Posted on 01/04/2010 10:23:21 AM PST by libh8er
About the first decade of what was to be the Second American Century, the pessimists have been proven right.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States began the century producing 32 percent of the world's gross domestic product. We ended the decade producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.
The United States began the century with a budget surplus. We ended with a deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, which will be repeated in 2010. Where the economy was at full employment in 2000, 10 percent of the labor force is out of work today and another 7 percent is underemployed or has given up looking for a job.
Between one-fourth and one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared in 10 years, the fruits of a free-trade ideology that has proven anything but free for this country. Our future is being outsourced -- to China.
While the median income of American families was stagnant, the national debt doubled.
The dollar lost half its value against the euro. Once the most self-sufficient republic in history, which produced 96 percent of all it consumed, the U.S.A. is almost as dependent on foreign nations today for manufactured goods, and the loans to pay for them, as we were in the early years of the republic.
What the British were to us then, China is today.
Beijing holds the mortgage and grows impatient as we endlessly borrow on equity and refuse to begin paying it down. The possibility exists of an eventual run on the dollar or even a U.S. debt default.
Who did this to us? We did it to ourselves.
We sold ourselves a lot of snake oil about the Global Economy, interdependence, free trade and "it doesn't make any difference where goods are produced." The George W. Bush Republicans ran up the deficit with tax cuts, two wars and a splurge in social spending to rival the guns-and-butter of the Great Society.
Abandoning its role as the fellow who comes and takes away the punch bowl when the party's getting good, the Fed kept the money flowing fast and free, creating the tech bubble that burst in Y2K and the stock and housing bubble that burst at decade's end.
To pull us back from the cliff's edge, over which we were headed a year ago, the Fed doubled the money supply, while the administration ran up deficit spending to the highest level since World War II.
Unlike World War II, however, there is no end in sight to these deficits.
The stock market, which flat-lined over the decade, had to surge 50 percent in 2009 to retrieve the worst losses since the Depression.
Everyone, it seems, except for Washington bureaucrats and Wall Street, for whom the bonuses never seem to stop, has been hammered by the sinking home values and shrinking portfolios.
After Sept. 11, the nation was united behind a president as it had not been since Pearl Harbor. But instead of focusing on the enemies who did this to us, we took Osama bin Laden's bait and plunged into a war in Iraq that bled and divided us, alienated Europe and the Arab world, and destroyed the Republican Party's reputation as the reliable custodian of national security and foreign policy.
The party paid -- with the loss of both houses in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 -- but the nation has not stopped paying.
With nearly 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and another 30,000 more on the way, al-Qaida is now in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, while the huge U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq serves as its recruiting poster.
Again, it is not a malevolent fate that has done this to us. We did it to ourselves. We believed all that hubristic blather about our being the "greatest empire since Rome," the "indispensable nation" and "unipolar power" advancing to "benevolent global hegemony" in a series of "cakewalk" wars to "end tyranny in our world."
After a decade of self-delusion and self-indulgence, we must stop deceiving ourselves. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, the "can-do" nation that won World War II in Europe and the Pacific in less than four years, that put a man on the moon in the same decade JFK said we would, is history.
We have a government that cannot balance its books, defend its borders or win its wars. And what is it now doing? Drafting another entitlement program as we are informed that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds have unfunded liabilities in the trillions.
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the question is not whether we will preside over the creation of a New World Order, but whether America's decline is irreversible.
He’s right about a lot of things but there are a few barf inducers here and there.
I agree. And it’s a shame he had to include those, because there is a message that needs to be conveyed here.
Sadly, it gets mired in the muck to the point it’s almost indistinguishable.
Pat seems right on to me.
Now I don't think I'm any different from anyone else here, so how is it our fault that the government has been looting the treasury for the last 40 years? How are we to blame for the coming socialized medicine and cap and tax which is being forced on us. I say we aren't, there are powerful forces that are working to see the end of this country as we know it. </rant>
He right about identifying what the problems are, but he's wrong about causes of them and solutions to them.
It's not free trade that's caused the collapse of manufacturing, it's that our workers can't/won't compete with foreign workers.
Tbe American worker expects an exorbitant salary, full health care, a nice retirement and an all around comfy lifestyle for menail tasks like screwing down oil-pans in Detriot.
Onerous regulations on imports (as Pat and others suggest) won't re-align the stars on the union worker being obsolete.
It takes two, and politicians wouldn’t be able to do the things they do if people would do things that are smart and effective. I’ve repeatedly tried both here and elsewhere to get others to do various things that would be smart and effective and I haven’t had much luck. That’s ranged from simple things like leaving comments at Time’s website to this ideology-neutral technique designed to force politicians to do a better job:
http://24ahead.com/s/question-authority
I first started promoting that technique in Feb. 2007 and I’ve posted it dozens of times to dozens of sites. And, I’ve gotten almost zero help with it, despite how effective it could be.
It’s a “tad” difficult to compete with slave labor. Check out some of the prices at alibaba.com and you’ll wonder how they can make things so very, very cheap.
Your link has good ideas that we can use in the upcoming election season at town hall meetings and campaign rallies. Every house seat is up so there will be town hall gatherings. All these people, especially those that voted for healthcare need to be put on the spot. Once these pols see we’re serious a lot of 0bama’s socialistic agenda will be slowed. As a further point, if your rep was one who voted down 0bama-care then he/she needs to be congratulated.
20million illegal immigrants do at lot to fill 10% of the US labor force.
What was the nation's "open borders policy" in 1900 and what was the size of the standard government handout even to non-citizens?
Welcome to the globalism of global socialism, economic justice where we send trillions of US money to foreign countries under the guise of carbon credits and saving the planet.
I don't see things getting better.
And yes, in 1962 our national leaders still understood that the US being self-sufficient and a producing nation meant being able to be independent and being able to produce whatever we'd need to accomplish the job in wartime as well as peace.
Lech Walesa knew that Poland and the other Soviet bloc countries were held under the grip of Communism because they didn't produce a "thing", they manufactured "parts" of things (but total production was divided among the nations). Again, think global socialism.
Granted, a small percentage of the non-U.S. global labor contingent might be classified as such, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of it cannot be called "slave labor" - however one would define the term.
Most of the foreign workers who are making and building the things we once did are doing so in the manner we once did.
That is, they are making and building these things without expecting a lifestyle that is disproportionate to the (often menial or unskilled) task they perform - a lifesyle that is quite luxurious relative to their overseas counterparts.
Budget surplus? Not in my lifetime.
The fact that an enemy engages in whack-a-mole does not confirm Pat's theories calling for a totally hands-off policy with regard to that whole dangerous part of the world.
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