You already know what my "objective" is for the USA, but in this blog I am going to explore some other areas.
My objective for the USA has not changed. It is still to attain the highest quality of life possible for the median USA family. I pointed out before that if an objective is too complex and tries to satisfy "all" the people it can never be implemented. An objective for the USA thus has to be simple and easy to calculate. That is why I am focusing on the income of the median family. Even while doing that some very interesting things can come up.
I used to live in Argentina back in the late 60's. If you know anything about the history of Argentina then you know that at one time they were the richest people in the world. There was an expression that was common in all the Americas and that was, "as rich as an Argentine". Sorry, but that is not the case anymore. Argentina is well down the list when it comes to median family income, but interestingly, they still enjoy and good quality of life. How can that be you may ask? Here is how.
Argentina does not have a very high median family income, but the have a very wide spread in family income. That is, some Argentines are very poor and some are very rich. In the USA, we would see this as being very bad, but there is actually a good side. In the case of Argentina, this allows the median income family to be able to hire a maid and a gardener. That is because some people are so poor and are thus paid so little that even median income families can afford to hire them for maids and gardeners. I guess this brings up another point.
I like to keep the objective simple, but how do you keep it simple and at the same time avoid a system where there are extremely poor and extremely rich people? That is clearly a challenge and where some kind of compromise is required. The socialist demand that all people are equal when it come to income. The problem with that is that at some point it causes a reduction in the median income and thus the size of the pie each person gets. The other extreme is the story of places like Argentina where they have extremes in family income. Where is the correct balance? I don't know and it is a point that needs to be continually debated while following the simple primary of median family income. In prior blogs, I have pointed out the having an objective to maximizing the size of the economy or the size of the pie does not assure that the median family with end up with a bigger piece of that pie. I think that you can see that growing the economy alone can not be the primary objective.
I guess that we are back to my original simple objective of growing the median family income and thus their quality of life. Keep it simple and it might actually work.
