It's not about our "standard of living", it's more about class mobilization. If you were born poor, you could still get a job at McDonalds, go to college on those wages, and buy a home/start a family and live middle class easily, if not upper-middle class if you chose a high-earnings potential career.

Today, that's close to impossible unless you take student loans, go through the gauntlet of getting a higher paying job, and then have to grapple with home prices assuming you don't live in a place with reasonably affordable home ownership.

If you think the DMV and government offices are "make-work" then we need to start with cutting military spending because it's the biggest "make-work" government program we have that the vast majority of U.S. spending goes to.

That's way off. The US spends 12% on the military.[0]

[0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...

Sorry about that, I meant to write "discretionary" in there. Regardless, the point of spending less on the military still stands.

We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.

Well, I paid into SS and Medicare for fifty years, and I’m getting less out than I put in. But, still glad to have them.

Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed.

The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.

Sounds like you know the difference between the two programs then.

Standard of living shouldn't be judged purely in terms of "stuff"; that's not how human brains work. There's relative effects ("keeping up with the joneses") as well as the effects of having options and possibilities for advancement ("American dream"). Make those things less accessible and people will feel less well off.

And outside of electronics a lot of physical-goods/land stuff is less attainable in many places in the country anyway.

The problem with non-redistributive approaches is that generational wealth rarely goes away. So if you don't have it, the number of people who don't have to try to out-spend you for whatever you want only goes up as time passes.

televisions are cheaper, food, housing and healthcare are more expensive [0]

I'm pretty sure the latter 3 are more important to standard of living than the former.

Ergo, I believe your claim that standard of living is superior to 1970 is false. Having a shiny iPhone to distract you from the fact that you're homeless, sick and starving is not a step up.

[0] https://mpost.io/wp-content/uploads/975d2151-7def-45a4-8c52-...

> I think schools would benefit from privatization

Well, we (in the US), have slowly been privatizing them and it’s bad! If you look at test results though, it’s great! Because private charter schools can drop underperforming students before the end of the term and artificially inflate their numbers. There are many more reasons that education with a profit motive isn’t better than without. I suggest maybe reading up on this before casually suggesting how you think we should radically erode our institution.

I went to private school and this is very true. If you are going to privatize schools well then private schools need to keep students with iep regardless of cost, like public schools , or they should get no funding whatsoever from taxpayers.