Re:China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D...
by mindslight on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:11PM
(#50077007)
Your #1 is exactly one of the things people mean when they bemoan oligarchs destroying the country. Rather than compete in a market, they buy off the government to approve mergers so they don't have to compete.
Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to borrow to do that but rather can make new money as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.
Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.
Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to borrow to do that but rather can make new money as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.
Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.