A weak dollar, outsized personal debt, a massive current account deficit, cash-strapped banks and Asian governments purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the national debt are not signs of American strength. Nor are they necessarily signs of American decline, because inherent U.S. vitality remains enormous.
But as Benn Steil, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested: “We could be seeing a secular shift in confidence in the dollar as a store of value as the impression grows that the United States, to some degree, is losing control of its destiny.”
I expect the United States to bounce back, but not quickly. The central fact confronting the next president will be the new limits on U.S. power, both military and economic.
The central challenge will be the provision of needed reforms, primarily universal health care, that begin to alleviate the financial strains on median American families and allow them to get back to saving rather than leveraging assets in a phony consumption boom.
This won’t be easy. But then it wasn’t easy for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a far worse situation in 1933.
Another “World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” headline from the former paper of record.
I like how Cohen excoriates the United States for living and spending beyond its means but then thinks that a solution to our problems lies in the adoption of a universal entitlement to health care that will no doubt be a dismal exercise in budget-busting.
Because, #2, doesn’t everything get cheaper and better-managed when the federal government takes it over?
Indeed, Jeffersonian, one of the unintended benefits of the Canadian socialized health care system is that it required many Canadians to become better familiarized with the U.S. Interstate Highway System so that they could locate those hospitals and clinics to which they fled for health care treatment that was better and more available than in Canada. I grew up in a city in northern Ohio where that was the case–numerous patients at local hospitals and clinics were from Canada seeking treatment unavailable in their country. I don’t know where Canada’s medical refugees would go if we were to follow them down the primrose path.
[blockquote]The central challenge will be the provision of needed reforms, primarily universal health care, that begin to alleviate the financial strains on median American families and allow them to get back to saving rather than leveraging assets in a phony consumption boom.[/blockquote]
No! No! No! Universal Health Insurance (We don’t have a “heathcare crisis,” we have a “health payment system crisis.”) can only be paid for by taxing individuals or taxing corporations that, in turn, raise prices to pay the additional taxes. Federalizing anything beyond the military is a bad idea.
True reform will come when people realize that they need to “act their wage” rather than keep up with the Joneses. Credit cards, unless paid off in full every month, should never be used for consumer purchases. The debt that they bring with them causes untold misery and has huge opportunity costs. When we as individuals and as a country learn that borrowing to have fun is wrong, then we will recover our leadership in world economics.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I know my friend and colleague Derek, from Hamilton, would have been paralyzed had it been left to Canada’s “compassionate” health care system. Luckily he managed to get a CAT scan in Detroit before that happened, showing a nerve pinched to the degree that it was almost severed. The doc in Canuckistan said it was all in his head and only grudgingly scheduled a CAT…three months down the road. The radiologist here said he’d be paralyzed in one.