A great deal of the debt "crisis" that afflicts us nowadays has to do with a simple question of imperial reach. Consider the simple truth: the US spends more on its armed forces on a yearly basis than the sum of what almost all of the other countries in the world put together spend. And you wonder why we have a budget deficit!
It used to be back in the days of the Vietnam War that people wondered whether we could afford guns and butter. Some razzle dazzle economic tricks let Johnson and Nixon (more or less) have both. The stagflation that followed for the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s was a direct consequence. But nowadays no one wants to talk about having to choose between imperial reach and home country welfare--and I don't mean welfare in the sense of support for the poor. Surely we are faced with precisely that question: do we want to be the hegemonic power, or do we want to have a successful economic system?
I know how I'd vote.
