As Miss Glick mentions – she will not be doing her column again until next Spring as she is working on a book. This blog (well at least myself) will miss her columns. Good luck Caroline, I did not always agree with you but you always wrote well edited and thought provoking columns. Thank you for giving me scores of columns to post.
by Caroline Glick
Mitt Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a fairly strong race. He made a few errors. And he made many good moves.
Certainly he was adequate. And he was probably the strongest Republican candidate among the primary field of contenders. That is, he was the best man available to run against Barack Obama.
And he did a pretty good job.
Obama, on the other hand, was a horrible candidate. He was mean and vindictive. He was contemptuous and superficial. He ran on irrelevancies like abortion and a fictitious Republican war against women. He didn’t give his supporters any reason to feel good about themselves.
Instead, he used class warfare to stir them to hatred of their countrymen.
Yet Obama won. And Romney lost.
In retrospect it is possible that the race was over before it began. A strong case can be made that Obama secured his reelection in 2009 when he bailed out the US auto industry and so temporarily stanched the hemorrhage of jobs in Ohio and Michigan. And maybe, with the youth of the 1960s now the Medicare recipients of the 2010s and ’20s, there are simply too many Americans dependent on government handouts to care about what happens in the future.
An equally strong case can be made that Romney lost the election before he secured the Republican nomination. He may have squandered his chances when he took a strong position against illegal immigration in one of the early Republican primary debates and so arguably made winning Florida, and perhaps Colorado, a mathematical impossibility.
Many have argued that demography is destiny.
And the American electorate has changed tremendously in the past decade. Government dependency among the white working class has grown. Government dependency among an aging population and a rising tide of single-parent families has grown. And the Latino share of the vote has grown. Today some are arguing that Republicans today simply cannot win the presidency, regardless of their candidate.
All of this is important because for the past four years, most Republicans, and most non-leftists throughout the world, had been hoping that the Obama years would be an aberration. They had hoped and trusted that he would be a oneterm president. All the policies he enacted during that term, on domestic and foreign policy alike, would be reversed by his Republican successor, elected by voters who understood they had been taken in by a huckster in 2008. The US economy – the anchor of US power and the engine of the international financial system – would come roaring back.
In international affairs, the US would reverse course. It would stop supporting the rise of its enemies from the Middle East to Asia to Latin America. It would embrace its allies. The former would be weakened. The latter would be secured and strengthened. America would be safe and defended.
Alas, apparently it could not be. The American spirit has been overwhelmed by the European model of social democracy at home and appeasement and treachery abroad.
But all the dependency champions who celebrated on Tuesday night cannot stop the coming storm. The greatest advantage Obama had going into the election was not demography but the fact that the full consequences of his statist economic policies and his pro-jihadist foreign policy have not yet been felt.
Nationalized healthcare will only be fully implemented in 2014. Americans will only begin watching old men and women die because the federal government denied them lifesaving, but expensive, treatments a year from now. They will only lose their doctors due to dwindling Medicare reimbursements in a year.
College students who got out the vote for Obama will only find themselves doomed to low-paying jobs and a life of indebtedness as they fail year in and year out to pay off their college loans, in a year or two. And by the time they realize what it means to be saddled with a national debt of $16 trillion, they will be locked into a government-controlled economy that requires them to keep their silence or lose their livelihoods.
THEN THERE are the consequences of Obama’s foreign policies. The attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi exposed the failure of his strategy of appeasing jihadists and had the potential to sink his presidency by turning suburban voters against him in places like Pennsylvania. But lucky for him, the Benghazi debacle was small enough for the media to hide from the electorate.
Sure a US ambassador and three others were murdered. But four is not a very large number.
And it was over in a day.
It will be harder for Obama to contain the damage of his foreign policy when Iran gets nuclear weapons and begins molesting US shipping in the Persian Gulf as gas prices rise to $10 a gallon. It will be harder for Obama to hide the effect of his foreign policy when American tourists in Egypt are massacred or held hostage and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in exchange for intervention.
It will be harder for Obama to hide the dangers of his foreign policy when the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan and al-Qaida rebuilds its training camps. It will be harder for Obama to blame his failure on hapless American filmmakers when Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is controlled by a Taliban-aligned government that seeks a nuclear war with India. It will be harder for Obama to protect America with a gutted, demoralized military, demobilized under his command.
Rather than contend with these calamities, Obama and his statist, pro-Islamist supporters and advisers will blame their critics. Just as they blamed – and jailed – an American filmmaker for Ambassador Stevens’s murder, so they will blame overworked doctors, struggling hospital administrators, “partisan” lawmakers and “Islamophobic, neoconservative warmongers,” for the domestic decline and international mayhem Obama’s policies will necessarily cause.
With the critical election lost, Republicans have a very hard and thankless task before them. They have to do the hard work of opposing his policies with dwindling resources. They have the job of energizing, inspiring and expanding a base that is demoralized. They have the job of explaining to wavering citizens why the Republican alternative puts America on the right track.
Conservatives need to prepare the ground for their return to power. They need to make the arguments for ending the welfare state. They need to make the arguments for destroying the ascendant – and politically savvy – forces of jihad at home and abroad. They need to argue against defense cuts even as the Obamaappointed Joint Chiefs of Staff abandon strategic reason for personal promotions.
And they need to write the books, produce the movies, found the television stations, and prepare the school curricula that will enable a future resurrection of the American dream.
[..........]
Israel’s demographic and economic power have been largely ignored and undervalued.
But the time has come to use them for all they are worth. As America enters its age of dependency and decline, Israel must end its age of dependency on America and begin to depend on itself. That does not mean that Israel won’t cooperate with America. But as America’s foreign policy becomes indistinguishable from Europe’s, Israel will increasingly need to take its fate in its own hands.
We need to expand the size of the IDF ground forces. We need to expand the size of the navy.
We should reinstate the Lavi jet fighter project.
We need to expand our independent offensive missile programs, developing a serious cruise missile arsenal. And we need to promote a new generation of generals that is not psychologically dependent on their American counterparts.
As for the Palestinians, and the international, leftist anti-Israel cottage industry that supports and feeds off of them, the time has come to take our demographic advantage for a spin. As we decrease our psychological dependence on America, we need to increase our trust in ourselves.
[..........]
True, talk is cheap. We can expect – indeed we were warned to expect – for Obama to turn on Israel immediately after the election.
Obama can be expected to dispatch his political advisers to Israel to run the Left’s electoral campaign with the goal of defeating Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and paving the way for the return to power of the socialist, appeasement-crazed Israeli Left. We can expect the State Department, (under the guidance of New Israel Fund alumni) to renew its attacks against Israel’s religious institutions and the Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. We can expect the US to abandon us at the UN. We can expect the US military to undermine any Israeli strike against Iran.
No one said any of this will be easy. But difficult is not the same as impossible. Within a year, the consequences of Obama’s failed domestic and foreign policies will make him weaker rather than stronger than he was in his first term. He will be hard pressed to pressure Israel when the US loses its leadership role in the Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Middle East. And Israel’s independence of action will consequently grow.
Our side suffered a massive loss on Tuesday.
But as long as we keep our minds and hearts focused on the fundamental goodness and truth that guide our path, we will not be defeated. We will endure, persevere and in due course, we will be vindicated.
Note to my readers: I am currently writing a book in which I describe the strategic course Israel and the US should take in relation to the Palestinians. To complete my work in a timely fashion, I am taking a leave of absence from my column until next spring.
Read the rest – A time for courage – and for action
Tags: Caroline Glick
By the time that happens, that indebtedness will have risen to almost $21 trillion, and the GDP will have shrunk accordingly. Obama is intent on raising taxes on small businesses. Let him. The unemployment rate will necessarily skyrocket, but that is the future that the majority (slim though it was) of Voters have chosen for this country. It isn’t a sustainable future, but then Obama doesn’t want America to have much of a future, and the Democrats are lock-step behind him on that.
@ Iron Fist:
Since most second terms are worse then the first term -- I can only imagine the disasters awaiting us.
@ Iron Fist:
Wait till all those people that are scrapping by paying their bills, or not, get those tax bills for not having the proper insurance. That will put a lot of people over the edge financially.
Then again, it may lead to a huge tax revolt in a few years after it takes effect.
@ Speranza:
Yep. Obama has already said he’ll throw us off the fiscal cliff if he can’t raise taxes on small businesses. I don’t know which will be worse for the Economy, but then fixing the Economy has never been on Obama’s radar. There is no help for it. We lost a close race, but we lost. By 2016, we’ll see the magnitude of that loss, but even if we win then it is really too late to save the Country. I think we are too divided to save, really. Too many people in the parasite class. Did you see this?
We are in a Depression, and not everyone on food stamps is a parasite, but a lot of them are. Certainly they are dependent on Federal Charity for food, and they no doubt voted their wallets. Rather than blame Obama for their circumstances, they chose to reward him for the “Free Shit” he gave to them. It is depressing.
@ Iron Fist:
as usual we only half get the message.
the 19-30 yo’s are also faced the brunt of the Bush wars and are freaking heroes. guess what, that generation, just like all the rest has libs and conservatives just like every other generation. the stats tell me once that generation gets married and has kids they will be conservative. it happens all the time.
but we as republicans just dump on ‘em while our own base didnt turn out…its lazy. we pass the blame and our own team didnt even show up.
so, why not listen to the 19-30 yo’s? see what they think, get inside the skull and peel off 15-20% of those who voted for 0 even though in their hearts they are actually conservative. ya know, maybe the right should open it’s ears then open its mouth and go after this group instead of being social scolds and sticks in the mud.
run a conservative who can explain what is going on, not a bobdole, john ‘my friends’ mccain, or W.
maybe try running a real conservative and for once please lay off the abortion gotcha question. the law is never going to change, never. it is set in stone; why some on our side continue to harp on a theoretical is beyond me, unless they love to lose. the dems were smart, they dropped gun control after they got clobbered on it and now they are pretty much running the joint. the abortions fight would matter if the law was ever going to change, it isnt its a pointless struggle that the left uses on us every 4 years.
we can bring back conservative power but we have to take our blinders off and taylor the core message, not change it. market it, its 2012 and we think its the 1950′s. use the technology, hire a marketing firm, go on the information offensive, and sell the product.
can you imagine what would happen if coke marketed its brand like the gop does its brand? there would be commercials bad mouthing young people and everyone else who isnt ‘pure’. they would go out of business quick.
yeah, its a bitch dealing with groups, it sux. but it is the reality on how to get your product sold. the information society by definition sorts itself into groups as people gravitate toward like markets and avoid those that are not in their like market.
Storagemanager wrote:
i hope they destroy every last object from ancient egypt.
the only income they have is tourism. let em rot. zawi hawass will have to move to the US to continue working.
Iron Fist wrote:
‘long is the struggle, hard the fight’ -- from an old baptist hymnal.
we will win this. we have to get smart tho.
@ PaladinPhil:
Yeah the $2500 TAX on people without health insurance is guaranteed to hit only the lower middle class and upper lower class. It could be the most regressive tax ever passed in American history. Romney didn’t run agains that, and I don’t guess he really could. Obama took ObamaCare from RomneyCare, after all, and Romney was unwilling or unable to repudiate that. Nonetheless, when that TAX phases in, a lot of people wo are already on the edge and can’t afford to buy health insurance will be pushed over that edge. This is a substantial tax. It’d be 5% of your gross salary if you were a family making $50K. That is not trivial. Now that we’ve passed it and effectively voted on it in a refferrendum, ObamaCare is the future. That includes the rationing that will come, and the lack of healthcare providers, and all the joys of Socialized Medicine. I wouldn’t be able to afford health insurance if I didn’t get it through my workplace. My COBRA payments when I changed jobs were almost $2000 a month!
@3 Storeagemanger
Just like the Taliban did to the Buddhist statues.
coldwarrior wrote:
I can live with that. Abortion should be a State question, anyway. Change the President, change the Supreme Court, and then fight that battle when the lay of the land favors us. Ultimately, the people who vote will be the ones that survived Roe v. Wade. Those will trend conservative, if only because the Liberals abort their young in much greater frequency thant the Right.
But all this is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We’ll be $21 trillion in debt at the end of the Obama Age. I doubt the Democrats permit a budget to be passed for the next four years, even if the House rolls over and begs. The Democrats don’t wnat anything set in stone, and besides, they are busily moving along our demise at the rate of a trillion dollars a year without a budget. Why would they stop now? We have to look forward to when it all comes apart. We’ll need to provide the leadership to guide a portion of the former United States to a safe harbor.
Iron Fist wrote:
i call it a fee on stupidity. people were stupid enough to vote for this joker, most of em low earners. here comes their medicine.
‘be careful what you ask for or you will surely get it!’
@ Storagemanager:
turkey invoked article 4, i seriously doubt article 5 will be invoked for a few cross boarder incursions.
@ coldwarrior:
That depends on what Obama really wants, doesn’t it? If Obama wants an excuse to go into Syria this could provide it. I’m not sure that he really does. The info I’ve been reading indicate Mali is the next war Obama wants to get us involved in. It is still a war to expand the Muslim Brotherhood. Expanding the Muslim Brotherhood appears to be a de facto aim of the Obama Administration. If getting us involved in Syria can do that, I expect him to find the excuse.
@ Iron Fist:
he would need most of the 28 members of nato to go along with him. i doubt that will happen. it certainly did not happen when the ppk was doing cross border raids out of iraq.
as for mali…well, expand the caliphate! maybe john mccain can go there and call them his friends as well.
I agree with this:
I’m for a tax on trust funds. Say, 10% per annum? Give John Kerry a chance to pay his fair share.
Iron Fist wrote:
Trust funds, endowments (Carnegie, Ford, Bill Gates, Harvard, etc.). We want to “soak the rich”? Let’s vacuum some accounts….
@ MacDuff:
It’d be worth it just to watch the Left scream. They want to raise taxes on small businesses. Let’s instead go after the real rich. Those people vote Democrat, anyway. I sincerely hope the Republicnas have the balls to do this. I think Obama and the Democrats intend to throw us over the Fiscal Cliff anyway. Make a sincere effort to stop them. I like the idea of a 20% excise tax on movies and music. Make the Liberals who’ve been whining pay.
This is right on the money. The Patients Protection and Affordable Care
Act is not health care reform , it is insurance reform.
More beneficiaries will be herded into the system with fewer doctors.
There will have to be significant rationing that will fall heaviest on
seniors and children under two years old.
This is eugenics based reform
@ Iron Fist:
The really big donors have been Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Craiglist, the ivory tower universities and the government including the DoD.
@ Guggi:
Yep, and I say tax the living shit out of them. I don’t think we shoudl fight Obama’s taxes at all, simple make sure he owns them. They are the Obama Taxes as surely as the ObamaCare tax on th eupper lower class and lower middle class is Obama’s tax. These people voted for higher taxes. Give them to them is spades.
Iron Fist wrote:
Yep, for years they’ve been asking “how much is enough?”. Let’s answer their question, resoundingly. Let’s go after their sacred cows and have a barbecue!
RIX wrote:
My sister is a doctor. She is considering leaving her corporate practice and just doing research. Barely squeaking by now with all the insurance and medicare/medicaid reimbursement level as they are, let alone when it gets completely hosed in 2014.
Storagemanager wrote:
Good. Now start firing missiles into Gaza.
the entertainment industry is a toxic, harmful business that creates bots and zombies for it’s market…dumbing down voters who drain the system for flatscreens, iPods and munchies while they drown themselves in AmIdol unreality and wrecking their sense of civic responsibility…
therefor tax the properties, cameras, discs, limos, theater tickets, dish and computer programs, make up products, costume companies and anything else even remotely associated with producing, delivering and consuming this poisonous drivel….if they need to tax gun ammo, fine…but lets be like fair…you know?….what about our mental health?
SciFiGuy wrote:
let the object lesson begin!
MacDuff wrote:
Eight of the ten wealthiest counties voted for Obama. You can soak them until they are prunes as far as I am concerned.
@ MacDuff:
If their income comes from investment and dividends, the tax is jumping from 15% to 43%; capital gains jumps to 23%.
Not to mention the tax on your home. And as I said yesterday, watch the “rich” threshhold drop down to $100,000 by the end of next year. These taxes aren’t going to do anything.
Also 401K confiscation will not doubt be on the board this year. This will be painted as the rich not wanting to give up their tax-free money and the law will be repealed. 401K accounts will be confiscated through Executive Order and you’ll get that fabulous 3% return when you’re 67. If you have outstanding loans, you will immediately be told to declare as income and pay taxes since accounts no longer exist.
@ Carolina Girl:
Elections have consequences. I said this was the most important election since 1864, and I meant it. We couldn’t afford to lose this one. The country is going broke, and all raising taxes will do is give them the excuse to blow more money. Not to mention what the new tax rates will do to the economy. They’ll get their “fair” tax rates, but the net government revenues will go down. Go Obama! I think we’re going to have a really hard landing from all of this. I don’t think the country will survive it intact.
Iron Fist wrote:
Raising taxes will not make a dent in the deficit, however I have zero sympathy for Obama voters whose taxes are raised.
Two years ago I made prediction to my friend, while we were jogging. I told him that by the end of this decade both EU and USA will have broken into two or more parts.
@ Carolina Girl:
Thanks there CG!! Now I’m Officially RICH!
Carolina Girl wrote:
That is what scares me.
@ Purre:
It seems likely to me. The USA may survive the decade, but we won’t make it two decades. The country hits the wall about 2025. Sooner than that, though, if Interest rates go up. God knows what confiscating the 401Ks will do to the economy. I don’t have anything to take, but my wife has a sizable nest egg. Unfortunately, not enough to move the money to the Caymans or anything like that. If they are going to start confiscation though, I want the Republicans to push going after the trust funds and endowments first. Those are huge assets that are protected, and they feed our enemies. Obama would veto it, but then the onus would be on him, not the Republicans. Also, I don’t think Obama can just confiscate the 401Ks byu executive order. Those are huge assets of the middle class. If Obama tries that, the Republican can (honestly) paint themselves as dfenders of the Middle Class. When people realize that jacking up the top tax rate affects their small bussinesses that they do business withg oro work for, then maybe people will be against it. When real unemployment hits 30% maybe people will notice that the Democrats are bad for the economy.
@ Iron Fist:
Economic reasons are certainly major reason why I made the prediction (writings were on the wall back then and well before), but also because of the growing social, religious and political differences, which are not dealth with, but are instead ignored and allowed to fester. In general, on both sides of the Atlantic there seems to be growing inability to exchange and debate touchy issues between opposite sides of the political spectrums. I am saying growing, since the frequency of the violence seems to be going up and it keeps sinking to somewhere between obituaries in the newspaper (ok, that was a bit of exaggeration, but only a bit).
@ coldwarrior:
My cousin advised that at least 10% of the surgeons and physicians at his hospital will be handing in their notices and terminating their privileges. Several of them are investigating setting up practices in Costa Rica.
@ Purre:
And to clarify: Violence is mostly from the left. Only rarely it is two way as far as I have seen.
Speranza wrote:
Mark Levin quoted someone on Friday (I forget who it was) who said “all of us will be paying for what a majority of us now deserve.”
@ SciFiGuy:
Me too! Ain’t it grand? Wonder when they’ll deliver my Cadillac?
Carolina Girl wrote:
Too true!
@ Iron Fist:
Oh, and… I hope that people do wake up. At least on that side of the Atlantic. For this side I have very little hope left.
Interesting — Romney got zero votes in 59 Philadelphia precints and in 9 Ohio precincts.
I’m sure the lamestream media will jump right on this.
http://weaselzippers.us/2012/11/12/wow-romney-got-zero-votes-in-59-philadelphia-voting-divisions/#disqus_thread
@ Purre:
Yes, and the tensions are very sectional. My state (Tennessee) went for Romney by 59-39 lopsided vote. Obama only won four counties in the entire State. The numbers were similar throughout the core f the Old South with the exception of Virginia and Florida. Virginia is easilly explained: the large number of Federal Employees in Northern Virginia made up the decicive coterie there. Florida is less so. Hispanics aparently made up the decicive vote, and I really don’t understand that. Hispanics are overwhelmingly Catholic, and Obama is th emost anti-Catholic President we’ve ever had. Apparently free shit from the government trumps religion with these people. Neverhteless, the tensions are, as I said, largely sectional. That creates neat dividing lines for the eventual breakup of the United States. The best future that I can see coming out of this is that the United States peacefully splits up into two or three smaller countries, and that my section continues to be a rump Republic under the Old Constitution. Everything else is worse than that. I can see sections of the former United States collapsing into Somolia-like anarchy. Detroit is the model for those, I believe.
@ Iron Fist:
Fist, I would not be surprised to find out that Florida was lost on the basis of the whole fairy tale that Romney would slice and dice Medicare and throw old people off the cliff. Which is exactly what is going to happen when they find out they’re all losing Medicare Advantage and will have to live with the government program.
@ Purre:
I hope people wake up, too, but i have little real hope of that. People won’t wake up until reality forces them to. We simply can’t go on forever borrowing a trillion dollars a year on the promise that we’ll pay it back someday. We already owe too much if you look at it as a debt to GDP ratio. If you look at it as debt to real possible State income it is far worse. The State can only suck about 20% off the top before it starts affecting the underlying economy in a negative way. We are already at tht line, and Obama wants to raise taxes. The results are frightenoingly predictible. When the inevitable happens, most of the Obama Voters will be blindsided, because the media that they pay attention to is completely ignoring this story. We’re broke and getting broker, and Obama is accellerating the pace of that.
@ Carolina Girl:
Could be. It’ll be interesting to see what the Senior vote does in 2016, but I think 2016 will be too late to save the country. We’ll be $21 trillion in debt by then. The numbers just don’t work from a debt-to-income perspective when we are there. We’ll be Greece with no one to bail us out.
@ Iron Fist:
On this side of the Big Pond Swiss have openly said that they will arrange military exercises in preparation of civil unrest in EU. Considering that we long list of fault lines that can erupt, I think that is only wise decision of them. As for what sort of division there might be, I expect UK to go their own way, South Europe and maybe France in its own way and Germany with Finland (maybe Sweden too?), Baltic and Eastern European countries in one bloc (New Hansa?). Those divisions would better represent the cultures and economic habits. But we’ll see. Predictions are hard to make, especially when it is future one tries to predict.
Carolina Girl wrote:
Cadillac ?? I want another BMW! A new one this time. 6 series convertible. Not that I’m picky or anything..
Iron Fist wrote:
As Rodan says to me in private, a lot (paraphrasing) “The low informed voter is the biggest threat to the country”.
@ Speranza:
Speranza, the low info voter voted for Romney.
theoutsider wrote:
thanks, you just made Rodans point for him
@ theoutsider:
Not to put too blunt a point on it, but fuck you. You’ve gotten what you want. Your Black Jesus® is going to crash the economy for you. Be of good cheer! I’m actually looking forward to it, because punks like you won’t last very long in what you’ve called down on us.
theoutsider wrote:
Keep thinking that as you move into your cardboard box during the coming years. As the country goes down the crapper the only thing that will cheer me up is that the Obamazombies will be going down the sewage system with it.
9/11 shocked a lot of former Leftists (Roger L. Simon and Dennis Miller to name two) out of their stupor. The coming econopolypse will likely bring a lot more people to our side. Alas, it my well be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory… .
Iron Fist wrote:
Ouch, that has got to have left a mark!
@ Speranza:
Are you kidding me Speranza? You are going to run a Akin/Mourdock ticket next time?
MacDuff wrote:
Again, the Obots will suffer with the rest of us -- probably more because they will not be psychologically prepared for it.
Purre wrote:
I regularly get trashed for talking about secession.
It’ll happen, whether anybody likes it or not.
It isn’t ideology -- it’s mathematics. As in budgets, spending, taxation, and sovereign debt.
theoutsider wrote:
Akin and Mourdock were dolts but at least we know that and maybe the GOP will wise up and have run-off primaries -- you will run a ticket of Deval Patrick and probably Martin O’Malley (or vice versa) and the novelty of having a black POTUS will have worn off and the reality of the decline of America might have set in and then the Obama frenzy may very well be seen for the aberration that it is. The good thing is that you will be suffering with the rest of America. I am a lot older then you and have fewer years left but at least I can recall a time when America was truly great.
MacDuff wrote:
I didn’t need 9/11 to remind me how evil the ideology of Islam is.
@ 1389AD:
Not just those, but aggregation of problems and differences reaching the tipping point and overcoming forces that keep the whole together. History has plenty of examples of similar event cascades that only few saw beforehand. From recent history we have for example Soviet Union as prime example. There too economy and other matters overcame the whole and it dissolved -- rather peacefully too, considering how bad it might have gone.
@ theoutsider:
Tell me, O Wise One, what do you think happens when the National Debt hits 150% GDP? Do you think the magic economics fairy will come and sprinkle fairy dust on it and make it better? Do you really believe that the Chinese will continue to loan us money at 0% effective interest rates indefinately?
In other news: The man who voices the puppet of Elmo on Sesame Street has taken leave amid allegations he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy.
Fritz Katz wrote:
At least it wasn’t Big Bird…
More interesting for who it is than what it says, but this piece by Robert Samuelson is surprisingly realistic:
Does anybody realistically think we can afford to pay for that? Read the whole thing. When you consider that the writer is a Liberal with the Washington Post, it is surprisingly realistic. Still, he doesn’t really raise the hard question: what does America do when her National Debt exceeds 150% GDP? There’s no one to bail us out.
Purre wrote:
Obama is relieved.
@ Iron Fist:
Or what happens if USA declares it will not pay its debts. That’ll have its own consequences cascading aroung the world, and in USA as well. Not nice ones, I might add.
Speranza wrote:
If it had been, he might have missed par on his next golf course. Now he can play like pro.
@ Purre:
Yeah, all the options are bad. We simply can’t pay that off. It dwarfs the size of the reparations that Weimar Germany was stuck with in the Treaty of Versailles. We could inflate it away, but that crashes the economy hard. We could simply default, but that crashes the economy. Hard. We’ll have to massively cut expenditures, certainly, but where do thse cuts come from? They could cut out the entire Department of Defense and not cover Obama’s budget deficit.
Iron Fist wrote:
The short answer is, we’re screwed.
Iron Fist wrote:
it’s really a simple question you ask…any BO supporter should have an instant answer by now, but I’ve never heard it….what’s the big secret anyway, c’mon outsider enlighten us
@ 1389AD:
Yep. This is what happens if we try to inflate our deficit away:
Hope you burned through your life’s savings before that hit. The economy will collapse. When that happens the internal centrifugal forces that Purre and I have been discussing will break the Country up. The American Experiment will be over. The People found a way to vote themselves money out ofthe Public Treasury, and from that instant we were done. All it took was for one party to be complicit in th ebankrupting of America, though the Republicans aren’t squeaky clean in that regard, either.
@ Iron Fist:
And through the debtors it will ripple to China, rest of Asia, Europe, Africa, South America. We’ll all live interesting times. Small country like Zimbabwe having such problems is not big problem for the economies around the world. USA’s problems will affect everyone. Considering that there’s existing problems everywhere, it can easily tip over any and every one I mentioned.
@ Iron Fist:
I’m of the school, that any short term fix is only moving the pain a little further down the road. Much as a drug addict or alcoholic needs to hit rock bottom, this nation will have to go there. Not sure if we can come back as a United US or not. It really comes down to who weathers the storm that decides what we will look like.
The last thing I want to see is blood being shed, but alas that’s what I see coming!
Sure hope what I see coming, doesn’t happen!
@ Purre:
Yes, when we fall, the world falls. Who will make the seas safe for international commerce without the USA’s Navy? Think piracy is only a problem around the Horn of Africa? There’s a reason for that. No other nation on earth has the Navy to secure international commerce. America is, in a very real sense, the engine that drives the world economy. Without us, everybody goes down. And what shall rise from those ashes? Nobody knows. I’d say a triumphal Islam will be the world’s number one problem, though. Other than oil, they don’t have much in the way of international commerce to disrupt.
@ Tanker:
Yeah, I hear you. I am hoping more for a peaceful dissolution of the Union than a repeat of the Civil War, but it is hard to say. The debtor States like California will want to keep the solvent states around to suck off of them until they are dried husks, but I don’t see the debtor states being able to finance a big war to keep us. And, too, certainly many of their citizens will be glad to be free of the constraints of Jesusland and the bitter clingers that populate it.
Iron Fist wrote:
And I for one would love to be rid of the bloodsuckers! Getting the reverse railroad ready to get the sane (conservatives) out of the debtor states will be the writing of new history lessons for our side!
@ Tanker:
I’d say that the dissolution will be more bloodless than you think. Biggest quarrel will come about which nation gets which assets, and there possession will be important. So if there’ll be violence, it can be about movable assets like ships, vehicles and aircraft.
Every time I start posting, a thread dies, or all have moved on! Must take me forever to read it all or I kill things. Logging off now!
@ Purre:
Natural Resources will be the big fight IMHO! Many battles to come!
@ Tanker:
Those natural resources that are on the border areas or offshore, sure. Otherwise it would require too costly warfare to bother at such dire economic situation, methinks.
Speaking of secession:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come….
I hope the petitions reach the minimum, since I am curious about the response.
@ Purre:
Yeah, I am too. I signed my State’s, and about ten other people did just while I was doing the email thing to get to where I could sign it. I expect that the White Hous will ignore them, though. That’s Obama’s MO.
Thanks for posting this outstanding article Speranza (and there is a lot of wisdom in the comments too). It’s important to remember that you’ve only truly lost if you give up which of course I will never do. Yes we are all down in the dumps right now which is understandable. Its time to pick ourselves up off of the floor, dust ourselves off and begin plotting our comeback.