Mark Steyn says that Romney has to get a little more apocalyptic:
As noted here previously, the International Monetary Fund predicts that China will become the world’s dominant economic power by 2016. So the guy elected in November will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to know what it feels like to be the global also-ran. Even this, however, understates the size of catastrophe the United States faces. There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America’s future, and left no more trace than if he and his high-school “choom gang” had wheeled a barrow of 5 trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called “unfunded liabilities” that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but that U.S.-government accounting conveniently absolves itself from, and you’re talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain-bike store . . . There’s nothing holding the joint up.
Hmm. “There’s nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012”: How’s that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly “Morning in America,” is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here’s a headline from the Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” this very week: “More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.” Maybe that’s the slogan. “It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt.”
The good news is that this was probably written before the news of the Ryan pick. It will be interesting to see Mark’s response to that.
“More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.”
Say what?!? If you’re retired and are still paying off your student debt, all I can say is: you retired?
Ryan, as Romney’s VP pick, was nothing short of genius – if government spending is to be a major theme for Romney. Fortunately, it should be.
This pick still leaves huge gaps in Romney’s foreign policy, military, legal and economic expertise – but his gaps pale in comparison to those of the Obama/Biden ticket.
The Blaze has an article from a few days ago on the 5 VP picks NOT to go with. Ryan is #1.</a
I don't think it is a good choice either.
#5 Jeb Bush – Nobody named “Bush” will EVER be elected President again, for the same reason nobody named Custer will ever win the office. Rom would get pelted with enough tomatoes to feed Uganda for 2 years.
#4 Bloomberg – Ye gods, not even RINOs would be stupid enough to consider him as a contender. What in the hell would he have to bring to the table????? Bringing the food fascist vote into the Republican fold? He’s the reason I want to see a restaurant chain named Molon Labe.
#3 Trump – Never a serious political contender to anyone who’s serious about politics. Deficit hawk who supports nationalized health care.
#2 The Unknown – historically, weren’t most veep nominees relative unknowns?
#1 – Ryan – The Blaze says keep him where we need him.
I read posts like Steyn’s and I don’t think “We’re drowning in debt!” I think we are drowning in fools. Fools with money to lend. That much debt isn’t getting paid off; it just can’t be. There’s a lot of people out there that are going to be very disappointed by the returns on their investments.
Don’t buy bonds. Own equity in something. And take cash.
I concur, somewhat. I do think we are drowning in fools. However, I think we could pay off the debt. When I see, “each person owes $70,000” or so. I can pay it. But then, I learned to pay off debt and avoid creating more of it. Obama does a good job making people like me feel like I made a mistake, and that’s why he is dangerous.
$700,000, not $70,000. You’re off by a factor of 10x. Still think a middle class family can pay off 20x income?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1380486/The-Age-America-ends-2016-IMF-predicts-year-Chinas-economy-surpass-US.html
Brett Arends writes in the Wall Street Journal that many have been looking at the wrong criteria when judging the prospects of both countries.
He said analysts were comparing China’s gross domestic product (GDP) against that of the U.S. – ‘a largely meaningless comparison in real terms’.
Instead, IMF analysts compared the difference in ‘purchasing power parities’ – what people earn and spend in their respective domestic markets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
Talk about your lies, damn lies and statistics.. Once again, the collectiviphiles are trying to claim that their preferred country is doing better than it is by comparing numbers that cannot be verified, or average out the real truth. The fact is, the “basket of goods” comparison is nonsense because it varies wildly across the nation. People in New York pay less than people in Phoenix, so which basket do you compare to Beijing?
What’s wrong with just comparing GDP? It doesn’t give the results they want.
Sorry Trent, but I disagree with you here. Of course there isn’t “one” basket of goods, but it’s still useful to look at these numbers. Because it does effect things in the world.
For instance, if PPP is higher than the direct currency that means that the country in question can “get more done” with less GDP. Stuff like build highways, or rockets, or aircraft carriers.
PPP is a good way to measure the actual economic activity going on inside the country, including non-tradeable goods like haircuts and restaurants.
Walter Russell Mead might beg to differ with Mr. Steyn about China.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/#post-35815
Well, the problem with Mead’s analysis is that China still has a growing economy (how much it is growing is open to question). Even if they bottom out like the Japanese did in the early 90s, they still can bottom out at an economy larger than the US.
The Chinese are not stupid people. A country with a billion people who want a standard of living like the rest of the world will have a large economy, perhaps the largest. But there are many countries who fight above their weight and that could be the USA. We only have around 300 million but we will on par with countries with triple our population.
Wodun,
I am sure if we dropped our immigration restrictions and had the same open door policy that existed throughout most of the nation’s history we could triple our population and economy in a generation 🙂
We already allow a lot of legal immigrants, millions a year. I am not against increasing legal immigration but simply increasing the population isn’t the answer.
It will be interesting to see how China survives the 3D Printing revolution and what it will do to its GDP. Distributed manufacturing and a centrally controlled culture don’t mix well 🙂
Also this a good illustration why a single number is never a good measure of power. In this case per capita GDP is in some aspects a better measure then total GDP for the standard of living since even when their economy surpasses the U.S. in size their per capital GDP will be below the world average, in fact, it will be even lower then Cuba’s…
As for spending into decline, you do have examples. Spain in the 1600’s, England following WWI…
Of course we could do what the GI generation did when they were faced with a national debt relative to the GDP higher then today’s in the 1940’s, which was to rise the marginal tax rates for income to pay the debt down.
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html
Of course it did create the dismal economic conditions of the 1950’s… oh wait, the 1950’s weren’t that bad, in fact there were a boon decade marked by much wealth creation 🙂 Well, it won’t take long for the Radical Right Republicans to revision that history making the 1950’s look like a dismal time, what with no iPads, or iPhones, or home computers, home microwaves… Gee, how did folks survive?
In the 50s, America had bombed or bankrupted pretty much all its industrial competition. It had most of the world’s money, most of the factories, and one of the most stable governments. You should hardly be surprised that it was also the most successful nation on the planet at that time.
But unless you plan to bomb China and bankrupt Europe (oh, OK, their bloated welfare states might achieve that part for you), it’s a meaningless comparison. America of the 50s was successful despite high tax rates, not because of them.
Edward,
That export bulge only lasted a few years, the real driver was the money spent domestically as the suburbs built out while the U.S. invested heavily in technology because of the Cold War. See the funny thing about tax dollars is they end up going back into the economy, not into some secret underground vault or into space. They don’t disappear, they circulate. That is something folks tend to forget today but the GI generation understood.
3D printing will create new markets and obsolete certain existing markets but industrial production of goods will still continue to exist. Just because there are desktop printers it didn’t mean the printing business ceased to exist either. It is still cheaper to mass manufacture a product using a dedicated production line and I doubt this will ever stop being true. It may be that in a world of abundance some sort of advanced 3D printing will be enough for nearly everything but that is not something I expect to happen for the next decades if ever.
Good let China, aka the People’s Republic of China, enjoy its stay at the top. I don’t expect it’ll be a very long stay because their demographic, environmental, economic problems like gigatons of bad loans to local governments, corruption, and the social unrest (180,000 demonstrations last year) that these difficulties are causing means their GDP growth has to drop off very soon, and maybe very sharply. I’ll give China ten years at the top before it falls off its pedesatal. The trick for the USA is to get its economy in shape, something we”ll have a real chance to do if Romney/Ryan in elected in November, so we can wave bye bye as the PRC falls past us. The biggest danger may be Beijing lashing out against its neighbors (Taiwan, India, S. China Sea, etc) using its ever growing military as the Chinese ecconomy tanks, resulting in an increasingly restless population. Everybody ready for a patriotic little war Chinese Communist Party style.?
I have heard these sorts of comments for a long time. The fact is China has a GDP per capita that is much lower than the Western economies. There may be some bubbles and yes eventually, when their GDP per capita gets high enough, they will stop growing faster than the other developed countries. We are still far away from when that is supposed to happen. They can still piggyback on developments done in the West in the last decades. The environmental problems will be handled once they have enough spare resources to tackle them. Their issue with bad loans is less of a problem than in the EU nations because they can control their currency, own the banks, have a centralized government, have a positive balance of trade and have few external debts. Corruption is an issue but it does not seem, a least to me, to be high enough that it will either stop or visibly impede economic development.
China also has little to profit from entering a war right now. The best course of action for them is to continue growth until their economic and military power is unassailable. Barring some sort of event like Taiwan declaring independence I do not see it happening. Even if Taiwan did it they would probably make a token gesture of aggression and table the war for later. I can see China getting involved in a major war but I doubt they will start it or that the focus will be anywhere near their borders.
A bit late Godzilla, but here a I go. Have you paid any attention to the growth of the PLA’s (People’s Liberation Army) influence in Chinese politics over the last 15 or so years? Some of their writings read almost exactly like those of German militarists just before WWI. The buildup of Chinese air and naval forces since the early 1990s has been designed specifically to intimdate the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific. Please look up the PLA’s “Two Island Chains” strategy and exactly what an ASBM (Anti-ship Ballistic Missile) is supposed to do. There is also a strong possibility that the PLA officer class may not be all that competent due to the old Chinese curse of corruption. The CCP may not want a war right now, but stupidity and the pressure of domestic events in China could lead to a disastrous miscalculation. And if the CCP, after being prodded by a very nationalist PLA, ever decides the opposition is weak enough, it might tempted to let the Chinese military try out its new toys. The PLA is NOT a western military, where civilian control is taken for granted, and Chinese governments down through the centuries have often had touble with rambunctious generals. In fact, the founder of every new dynasty was a military man, or at least had a lot of military experience, like Mao, example.