- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Huge numbers of Americans think, and thought in the 1970s, for whatever reason, that national deficit is just the worst thing in the world and that balancing the budget is absolutely vital. It's one of the core underpinnings that made it possible for the modern Republican Party to exist in its present form.
The idea that the US government runs a deficit just seems to fill a sizeable minority of American citizens with rage and they are willing to cripple the country rather than allow it to continue. And a lot of other people just shrug and accept that this is okay.
Frankly that's a damn good argument for stopping at Stage 2. We probably do need Stage 2, but that places Stage 3, I would think, in the category of "obsessive-compulsively extending the network dangerously far past the point of diminishing returns."
Remember that time we had a... I think it was a 1400-point project option to do gauge conversions on every random little mountain railroad in teh Balkans, in the immediate post-WWII era when even more of the roads were dirt and we still had extensive wartime damage to repair and the baby boomers were being born and there was basically no housing and so on and so on?
I think that Stage 3 rural roads would be in that category.
To be very clear here, in the quest the United States still has the advantage in technology in almost every field. The most sophisticated things the US can do at any given time, the USSR usually cannot duplicate as a technical feat. Their computers are a little ahead of ours, their machine tools are a little ahead of ours, and so on, and so on.
This translates directly into advantages in the manned space program, in that when the US funds something (NASA does not exist as I recall in this timeline) they have a lot of good aerospace tech to put into making it happen. It also translates into the fact that by one of the simplest, most easily understood metrics ("who had pocket calculators/CNC machine tools/this/that/other thing first?"), the US tends to win a lot. They invent, not literally everything, but metaphorically everything, years before we do. And you can say "that's private innovation doing great stuff."
HOWEVER.
That kind of 'firsts' is not necessarily the only way to measure how well a country is doing, or how prominent and successful it is in world geopolitics. It is arguably not the best way, either.
The USSR has a much, much stronger industrial and economic base than in OTL, both per-person and in absolute terms. It has the means to support a considerably higher "developed world" lifestyle than was available to the typical Soviet citizen in 1979 in real life. The wait time to get an automobile is shorter. The commieblock apartments are nicer and much better furnished. The appliances in the commieblocks could plausibly pass Underwriters' Laboratory safety standards. People are starting to get credit and debit cards. Pocket calculators are increasingly common and there is a thriving Soviet computer industry that does not hinge entirely on reverse-engineering and copying American designs. The clothes are, I'm pretty sure, more comfortable, the variety of food available is, I'm pretty sure, greater and of somewhat higher quality.
On the global stage, the USSR has fairly strong economic ties to a larger bloc of nations. The equivalent of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe stretches all the way to the Rhine, the US is on better economic terms with communist China, and also with other Asian nations like India and Indonesia and Japan (not all communist). The USSR's large industrial base serves it fairly well in this respect because it can export to this wide market- we can actually make very significant $$$ by building luxury car factories because people, both in the USSR and overseas, are buying them. Conversely, the US's global network of influence through international institutions is weakened relative to OTL; some of the institutions that power leans on do not exist and others are smaller than in OTL.
Even in light of knowing how the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seems very unlikely to everyone involved, including the QM, that this version of the USSR will collapse at any point in the foreseeable future, including and beyond the year 2000.
...
Meanwhile, the US is not clearly and unambiguously doing better, but rather differently. There have been some significant alternate-historical butterflies in their political history, and they are still an immensely wealthy industrialized nation. But they are not unlimited, and the limiting factor on how much the US can accomplish is not, in fact, merely "motivation to keep up with the Soviets." They have their own internal political struggles and their own big rocks to carry, and that can easily hamstring them in competing with us, just as our own rocks to carry can limit our ability to compete with them.
Yeah, but conscription is nowhere near as burdensome when your country isn't actually fighting bloody foreign wars, something I gather that the US in this timeline has avoided.
Well, the thing is, British imperialism postwar took the form of trying to keep India by force. This was a terrible idea and it immediately caused them to blow out a tendon, resulting in the downfall of the Churchill government and basically taking them off the stage as far as strategic relevance was concerned (we almost never hear about them in the foreign affairs updates).
They'd have been far more dangerous as a notional far-right imperialist power if they hadn't taken a massive hit from trying to keep India, which in turn left much of their populace probably very, very unwilling to do anything that would result in more of them dying to ensure that the sun really never sets on the British Empire.
Last edited:
