All three of these have been percolating about in my head, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that the cost of America’s recently-concluded latest war, in both human misery and the fiscal sense, has barely even begun to be tallied.
You Have Been The Victims Of A Terrible Swindle
[B]efore you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job. […]
This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!”
It’s the infrastructure, stupid!
Basically the US, as a country, is like a rich person that spent an amazing shit ton of money on the best imaginable security for his house, ringing it with multiple moats, missile launchers, thousands of full-time heavily armed guards with the best possible weaponry and equipment, and on and on and on. In fact, this person went so overboard that he borrowed from anyone who would lend to him for all this crazy security. And while the multi-decade project of building this security apparatus was going on, he neglected to pay any attention to the source of his wealth. […] And by the time his security was perfect, he knew nothing but fear and hadn’t yet realized that he no longer had anything worth protecting.
We’re currently at the point where the creditors can still be kept from collecting by the massive military machine we’ve built, but eventually we’ll run out of money to pay them, too. And then the whole house of cards comes down.
And, most tellingly, the contrast of a country actually investing in its people and its future vs. a country that is basically bankrupt. Their Moon Shot and Ours – NYTimes.com
China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers […]; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.
Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.
If that wasn’t clear enough: we are hugely fucked, y’all.