The more you look into the exploding national (and worldwide) debt problem, it is hard not be afraid. But our demise has been much exaggerated or at least delayed. Life goes on. People buy homes, get jobs, go to work, go to the store, occasionally go on vacation, etc. In 2010, Obamacare scared the Bejesus out of everyone paying attention and fostered the Tea Party movement. But the movement seems to have lost steam. The bottom has come and gone. The economy is anemic, but we’re not riding around Road Warrior style scrounging for survival. We’re certainly not Greece! Sure, there’s a kind of fog over our national economic life. People have smaller families, younger people have less wealth and the most enterprising often start out life burdened by student loans. Older generations are working longer and facing a leaner retirement. But these are problems of the gradual variety; a real crisis, such as what is facing Greece or faced Germany in the 1920s has not occurred.
This may, of course, only be an Indian Summer. The worst may be yet to come. But if you read Zero Hedge, Nouriel Roubini, and other outlets, they have Cassandra-like been promising the end of the world for three or four years now. Their predictions don’t seem to be panning out. Or perhaps they’re just “early adopters.” Time will tell.
This is no reason to pretend all is well. The “gradual” problems are bad enough. Our economic growth has been fairly stagnant since the 1960s. And these problems are exacerbated by anti-social behavior by the lower classes that continually stretch and bloat and expand the government’s welfare apparatus and the cohort of unproductive people. These problems build on themselves. Even if we don’t become some dystopic Hobbesian land of anarchy and poverty, we are slowly becoming unrecognizable to the America of yesteryear. The control over our lives, the hindrances to wealth creation, the degradation of our traditionally enterprising character are slowly corrosive. Instead of facing deadly cancer, the debt seems more like a chronic disease, the economic equivalent of lupus or asthma. And it is suffocating us, even if we’ll go out with a whimper, consoled by new iPhone apps, Facebook, and other ephemera.
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” we are slowly becoming unrecognizable to the America of yesteryear.”
Slowly? Excuse me, but did you see the article in the NY Times about out-of-wedlock births? they are now the majority of births to young women w/out college educations. Impossible to imagine that working class whites of yesteryear would countenance such disgrace.
Face it, Mr. Roach, our family structure is shot to hell. Perhaps as you say we are faced with manageable decline, and that a merciful God will enable us to claw our way out of this in some future generation. But it is just as easy for me to imagine that a weakened society is devastated by some as yet unpredictable coup de grace brought upon by our own immorality. A drug-resistant STD, easily spread? Who knows. I’m not hopeful.
If the dollar ever loses its status as a reserve currency, or if for any other reason we can no longer borrow money at ridiculously low interest rates, these problems will all suddenly seem much more immediate.