Australia's choice - US style ruin or a fair society?

If nothing else, Australians now know what this gov is really about. And the direction they want to take us, that being firmly in the direction of a US style dog eat dog society. Thing is, we don't buy all the rhetoric about US that our pollies so like to slather them with. The US has severe social problems bought about by 30 years of Reaganomic trickle down bullshit. This is not a path that Australians want to follow..... as evidenced by the budget reaction and Abbott's poll crashes.

The 2014 coalition federal budget was aimed at dramatically upsetting this balance, taking several very large steps towards the US model. 

Currently the majority of unemployed Americans get no unemployment benefits. Their public school outcomes are amongst the worst in the developed world and their public healthcare is extremely limited and particularly expensive for the mediocre outcomes achieved. 

However, their system has resulted in relatively high levels of economic growth when compared to most of their European counterparts. The downside of this economic success story is that the overwhelming majority has gone to those who are already well off. The majority of US citizens have seen little or no growth in their real wages or material standard of living over the last 40 years. They work longer hours than Europeans, they have less paid leave, less penalty payments for working outside normal hours and less support should they lose their jobs. In other words, basically everything about the US system is worse for all but those at the top of the economic pyramid. 

Perhaps even that would be OK if the US was the land of opportunity as it’s often claimed. Unfortunately even that’s not the case. In the US, the link between sons and fathers income is twice as strong as it is for Scandinavian countries. In other words, a child born to poor parents in the US is twice as likely to stay poor as one born to poor parents in northern Europe. The same goes for educational and health outcomes. 

Which of these two directions we want to take is a critical question but it is not one that we are answering with our eyes open. The backlash against the Abbott and Hockey budget has been strong but, for the most part, it has not stemmed from an awareness of these bigger picture issues. more