In partnership with Obama, GE exploits the power of big government to enrich its shareholders while making the rest of us poorer and less free.

These aren’t medical problems; they’re social problems. And there hasn’t actually been a lot of inspiring progress on the social problem front in the last hundred years. “Give poor people more money” is mostly as far as we’ve gotten. It works for problems that mostly stem from not having enough money–like malnutrition, or lack of adequate clothing. But it’s the opposite of the problem we’re trying to solve now.

When some people hear the relative stagnation thesis, their minds shoot to various bogeymen: Paul Ehrlich, ridiculous 1907 proposals to close the patent office, predictions of mass starvation, and so on. The simplest version of the point is that technological progress is not uniform, and that is borne out by thousands of years of human history. This isn’t Lake Wobegon, so some periods have to have lower than average growth in living standards than other periods. One of those periods happens to be now, since 1973, give or take. And from that flows many propositions of importance, for politics too.

The sad truth is that according to current projections, we could eliminate ALL federal non-defense discretionary spending and still run a deficit. The elephant in the room is entitlements – especially the fast growing Medicare and Medicaid programs.