Public investment

During the era of greatest peacetime public investment in US society (partly in technologies as part of an explicit effort to compete with Communist economies), the US economy grew at an average rate of around 4% per annum between 1947 and 1973. Everyone benefited. Who's more likely to give us policies like that in the future? --That thought's a challenge both to Romney and the GOP, whose cuts (20% cap on federal spending, 4% reserved for Defense, much more reserved for social insurance programs...any actual cuts remaining blissfully unspecified) would seem to necessarily slash existing public industrial/scientific investment, and to Obama, under whose leadership new technologies and industries necessary to grow our economy in the long term have received inadequate support--the obvious and important exceptions to this being the rescue of an existing industry, the auto industry, as well as the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in 2009, which provided substantial funding for a few efforts like solar power (still...not enough in the medium term).

Without continued strong economic growth, broadly shared across the economy through high-level (i.e. high-tech?) jobs, the entire social compact comes under stress. Who's going to step up and fight?