Ian Welsh channels the still living Gore Vidal
What fun. Gore has pretty much given up writing his alternative State of the Union message; but our own Ian Welsh at Tilting at Windmills and the Blogging of the President has picked up the torch.
The US is bankrupt.
tilting at windmills
Ian leads off. Well, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It depends on what you mean by bankrupt”. The United States owes a great deal of money as a government and Americans owe a great deal of money individually; but bankruptcy occurs when a) there is no one who will continue to finance the debt and b) there is no reasonable prospect of being able to repay the debt. At the moment, with a war on, a Congress obsessed with earmarks, assorted natural disasters and, frankly, a President who has forgotten the line item veto, the debt is around 61% of GDP. Not good. However, compared, for example, to Japan’s 162% of GDP position, the balliffs are not quite at the door.
The US is a propaganda state.
Gore used the much more sinister, America is a national security state. Ian has an earlier, but unlinked post, on this which I don’t have time to read. But his example is “on important issues, like who attacked the country, US citizens simply believe things that are lies”. It is possible that Ian has slipped on the full metal beanie and is going with Mossad, the Jews and Halburton as the 9/11 culprits. Me, I’m sticking with OBL and Islamofasism financed by mainly Saudi money. I have yet to see anything very convincing to suggest any other explaination as to “who attacked the country”.
The US has a military it can’t afford. That military is a battlefield superiority force and completely unsuited for colonial wars of occupation.
Yes to the latter: however, America is not in the business of fighting “colonial wars of occupation” no matter how devoutly Ian and the BOP folks want to characterize Afghanistan and Iraq as colonial adventures. As to what military American can afford that remains an open question. At this point decades long investments in high tech net war are paying off in fairly effortless battlefield domination. A lesson which may, or may not, be registering in the hearts and minds of enemies a wee bit more significant than Uncle Cuddles. In which case the investment is very definitely worth it.
The US political system is irredeemably corrupt.
has been since Mr. Shoddy first discovered there was money to be made selling goods to Union troops in the Civil War. however, the idea of irredeemably may not be entirely accurate. The growing “porkbuster” movement in the US is encouraging. So are some of the spending limit proposals. But, most of all, the fact that the institutional, bi-partisan, corruption of Congress is being exposed offeres some hope that anti-corruption insurgencies may break out. Not likely in this round of congressional elections; but 2008 may be a whole new ballgame.
Average Americans have not seen a wage increase in 30 years, in real terms.
This would not surprise me a bit. The problem is that “average Americans” are not the engines of economic growth which they once were. They have been priced out of world markets partially because of wage competition, partially because, in combination with largely inert managements in smokestack industries they relied upon protectionism to ensure their iron rice bowl remained intact. Unions resisted productivity measures and, with a speed which astonished them, saw their jobs go to Mexico or Asia or even Canada. That, I fear, is how free markets work.
The US has had a class war, and the rich won it.
The American economy moved from an industrial to a post industrial situation and the value added came less and less from labour and more and more from capital and ideas. There is an international market for capital and ideas and if a government chooses heavily tax either they will - for tax purposes - move elsewhere. Certainly the United States could have kept high marginal tax rates; but at the ost of seeing its one significant competitive advantage erode.
A proper correction of the US economy, including its various deficits would lead to a 15% to 20% decline in general standards of living.
This is largely meaningless as there is no serious way of determining what a “proper correction” is. There are plenty of circumstances in which the American economy might contract by that much or more. There are also circumstances in which it could expand at a greater than 5% rate for a number of years.
The US is currently a protectionist state, where agriculture, real estate, medicine, the prison/police industry, and the military industrial complex are where people make money.
This would seem to contradict the logic of Ian’s earlier statement about the absence of any increase in average people’s wages. But, no matter, if you look at the examples, they are all areas which cannot be easily exported. Nor are theyparticularily threatened by foreign competition. It is difficult to imagine why you would need protectionism, conventionally defined, for real estate or the prison/police industry.
There is, however, lots of evidence that Congress in a gang of theives bi-partisan manner are more than happy to pass absurdly protectionist legislation (and the President willing to sign it). See corruption above. The way, of course to bring this to an end is to elect really hard core free traders to the Senate and the House.
The US is an ignorant state with a decaying education system.
Well don’t tell Larry Sumner cause he might think it a good idea to have universities which actually teach rather than toe the PC line. It is a good point however so long as you largely ignore the fact that most of the world’s top universities are in the United States and that huge numbers of extremely well educated people graduate each year in Arts, Sciences, Engineering - broadly defined), Coputer Science and so on. Sure, there are lots of bogus BAs and there is far too much “credentialling” in the name of fairness which excludes rather than includes certificate challenged but competent people.
As for the “functionally illiterate underclass ” the roots of that trouble are partially in funding but mainly in the disintegration of particularily black family life in the US. Where the responsibility for that lies is difficult to determine; but I am inclined to think that Daniel Moynihan had a fairly clear view of the nature of the problem as early as 1965.
The US has a massive underclass which it keeps in line with a harshly punitive and injust legal system which incarcerates more people per capita than any other modern nation, even surpassing Russia.
Given that I think that the War on Drugs - which is how most of the “underclass” get to prison is a horrible mistake and a rolling train wreck of a policy which, tragically, has some resonance in key voting segments of the American population I agree. But I am damned if I can see what is to be done about it.
A ceasefire in the WOD without full legalization would, if anything, simply encourage more gang violence and drug use. Until the profit is taken out of drugs the same insane patterns will contiune to repeat themselves.
The US, in short, is a hegemonic power near the end of its golden era….Like most hegemonic powers in such a position there are still the necessary resources to turn things around. But like most powers the road to ruin has been chosen, because choosing life would require painful changes.
I am inclined to think that a part of the United States is, in fact, just on the threshold of a truely golden era. And one which will float all boats.
It is late and I’ve not the time to do justice to the future but the bullet is this: the intersection of genetics, nanotechnology, information science, intelligent energy design, longevity research, pharmaceutical specifics, space engineering and computation is a reality right now. The groundwork in everything from materials science to artificial intelligence has been laid. The rapid, within a fifteen to twenty year horizon, deployment of working technologies based upon the decades long investments in basic and applied science has already begun.
The old American economy is or will, very shortly be, dead. It is an economy which made things and there are now cheaper places to make things if it is people who are making them. Those things revolved around the quaint custom of buring dead dinos at 1% efficiency to drive places. That is over.
What will replace it are sets of technologies which eliminate the need to drive anywhere while offering the means to do so at first 5% and quite soon 30-40% efficiencies. And the amount of work, good work, well paying work, which will be creted as that particular transformation takes place will be astonishing.
However, along with the transformation of the 20-25% of the American economy devoted to the car, the advent of really good medical, nano technical and genetic therapy; the creation of relatively intelligent ipod like devices; the extension of productive life by several decades will all tend to create an economic powerhouse an order of magnitude greater than America’s current, transitional economy.
And yes there will be dislocations. And yes avian flu could set some of this back. And yes, a default on the soverign debt of America would create a worldwide depression. However, fundamentally, the technological train is on the rails and there is really no stopping it.
The only question will b whether or not the rest of the world, including Canada, will be bright enough to adopt the engines of radical change which are already arriving daily.
Written by jay on March 1st, 2006 with 7 comments.
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