Anyone who will study the figures provided here will see the similarities to situations in other countries that have included Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Italy, and many others in the past; and to Greece, Portugal, Spain, and others in the present.
federalreserve.gov
Comparisons with Zimbabwe, postwar Hungary, and the Germany of 1923 are too farfetched.
But in just over 10 years the United States has gone from fiscal responsibility to insolvency, borrowing money from China and Japan and others to pay for wars (or whatever they have been) that have accomplished little; badly-administered social programs; and immense transfers of wealth to those at the center of the financial system.
Huge amounts of money are also being squandered on superfluous and now unused buildings, oversized and overpowered vehicles, and that protracted and unproductive adolescence known as "higher education."
Taxes at the moment are covering less than half of these expenditures. The rest of being covered by continued borrowing, but even more by electronic bookkeeping entries created by the Federal Reserve.
Maybe 1% of the population is getting a huge share of the wealth and income, but my guess is that less than 1/100 of 1% of the population has any idea how badly things are being managed.
And a large fraction of those who do see the problems are people who harbor prejudices and opinions not acceptable to most Americans, so nobody wants to listen to them. To call Obama an economic ignoramus is to make oneself sound like Jesse Helms. To be a liberal Democrat seems to mean that you have to agree with Paul Krugman.
As Will Rogers said, “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
I see all my fellow Americans lining up to pee on the electric fence. |
