AggregateDemand's problem (and I realize this is going to be a 'sagepost', and I don't really care) is that he's enslaved to bad metaphors. E.g.:
If you eat 3,000 calories per day, you're going to have to burn calories to maintain healthy weight. You can lift weights to increase work output and gain muscle mass. You can run and do cardio training to increase work output and endurance. You can walk around in circles, which burns insufficient calories, and only makes you good at walking in circles.
Republicans are the people who say "If we're not going to change our workout regimen, we might as well cut government caloric intake to 2,000 calories per day, and stop walking circles". Democrats are the people who say "I can't believe Republicans think there is something better than walking in circles".
Explaining government nutritional science to American liberals is like trying to fell Ironbark with a dull spoon. Of course liberals think Republicans are anorexics. Anyone who stands between them and the buffet is fascist pig...
This is an incredibly bad set of metaphorical imagery for a few reasons, not the least of which is that society is not a metabolic organism; it does not function in predictable ways - contra the Enlightenment-era tendency to view society through a framework of essentially static images - and so there is no equivalences to 'exercise', 'overeating', 'caloric intake control', and so on. The economy is not physiological.
This is a problem with most contemporary political frameworks, and I genuinely think a lot of problems could be solved if we simply had a different imaginary vocabulary to express them in. My conception of things is much closer to smoke circulating in a fan blade, or maybe some of the more chaotic concepts emerging out of quantum physics. Conceiving of society as an essentially predictable pattern of cause-and-effect correlations is
so eighteenth century.
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