If the US were a person it would be a mollycoddled CEO who has lost his job, has no savings leftover from a couple of lifetimes of binge spending and is now finding it frighteningly hard to adjust to a life without salary or perks.
This spectacle has thrown up a rather piquant stand-off that illuminates the human condition well.
A week ago a Republican called Paul Ryan produced a financial strategy. The punditocracy of the right went into raptures over it.
The Economist the erudite standard-bearer of the conservative rich, praised it in last week's issue in a leader titled "Praising Paul Ryan. At last somebody is trying to grapple with America's fiscal trouble".
Sample the piece:
"He also outlines a simplification of America’s mad tax code, bringing the top rate for both individuals and businesses down to 25% by eliminating loopholes"
This would force them(them being broadly the old, the poor and the profligate sate and local governments that hands out dole to these blood-sucking sections of society)to manage their budgets more responsibly than they have needed to when they have been able to send much of the tab to Washington.
So now you have the salient points of Ryan's strategy.
President Obama last evening tore into Ryan's proposal.
The Wall Street Journal, that rabble-rousing poodle of the rich, jumped into the fray this evening.
"The Presidential Divider. Obama's toxic speech and even worse plan".
No need to quote this Murdochian paragon of virtue. It just fulminated against Obama.
The pundits of the left have of course joined the fray.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics, wrote an opinion piece in today's New York Times titled "Who's Serious Now?".
Krugman deserves quoting:
"Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the (Ryan's)proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy."
This battle is pure black and white. The reason why I follow the US so closely is that it is that one country that highlights all of humankind's myriad drama's which are in other places lost in the detail (like the wag said "to me Hollywood is not an American product.To me America is a Hollywood product").
What's happening in the US highlights that class struggle as a defining socioeconomic and cultural theme is back after hibernating for close to a century. It is now Rich versus the Rest all over the world. It is on the streets of the Middle-East. It is in Delhi's cocktail chatter about a hungry man on a podium. It is in the euro-crisis. It is behind the uneasiness of China's rulers.
World War 3 is among us. The Rich versus the Rest. Decide where you belong. I have.
