Committing National Suicide

According to the Times of London, the Swiss government is planning to crack down on what appears to be an epidemic of suicide tourism. I'm not familiar with the situation, but I suppose people from less enlightened countries, in need of ending their lives, can visit the alpine paradise to get the deed done.

We in the United States, however, needn't worry about raising the air fare from our shrunken pocketbooks. We are in the midst of committing national suicide right here at home. I know, know, people have been predicting the end of American civilization as we know it since the New Deal, perhaps even since the Wilson administration. This time the doomsayers maybe on to something.

The nail in the coffin will be our enormous national debt. While the current debt has been with us for decades, it got really serious during the Reagan administration. At this point, it began quickly climbing to $200, then above $300 million. The prosperity enjoyed during much of the Reagan Administration gave the impression that, while budget deficits might be a bad thing, their elimination need not be a proiority. The Carter era inflation had been “tamed”, crippling interest rates had been brought down; as far as most observers could see, the major down side of the Reagan era was the low rate of return for investors, due to the depressed interest rates.

Given the current administration's projections of trillion dollar deficits into the near term future, it's hard to believe that we were ever worried about those puny $300 billion dollar IOUs. That's part of the problem; no matter how high we have run up the deficit each year, we've been able to get away with it. Congress blames the executive, the execuitive blames Congress (unless they are of the same party). The fact is that there is so little political consensus in the country that only a budget busting deficit, that fills nevery one's rice bowl, is passable through both houses of Congress.

This time, however, things are different. To use a phrase from the old Soviet dialectict, the correlation of forces is working against us. While the situaion has been developing for some time, we are now rapidly slipping into a position of extreme financial vulnerability within the international community.

Although industrial strength peacetime budget deficits date back to the 1950s, suicidal national behavior dates from the late 1970s, as we began de-industrialiazion, beginning with the auto and steel industries. Early de-industruialiaztion was to the benefit of Japan, but the pace increased rapidly with the rise of Red Chinese state sponsored capitalism.

Where will this take us? I don't know, but I do know that there really is a limit to how far we can drop. We might not notice for a while yet, but the sudden stop should be startling. Who will be less happy at bt6hat point, the government, or the remainder of the population? Watch this space.