Posted on 01/11/2006 7:06:56 AM PST by Theodore R.
America's Superpower Days are Over by Paul Craig Roberts Posted Jan 11, 2006
President George W. Bush has destroyed America's economy, along with America's reputation as a truthful, compassionate, peace-loving nation that values civil liberties and human rights.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes have calculated the cost to Americans of Bush's Iraq war to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. This figure is 5 to 10 times higher than the $200 billion that Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsey estimated.
Lindsey was fired by Bush because his estimate was three times higher than the $70 billion figure that the Bush administration used to mislead Congress and the American voters about the burden of the war. You can't work in the Bush administration unless you are willing to lie for dub-ya.
Americans need to ask themselves if the White House is in competent hands when a $70 billion war becomes a $2 trillion war. Bush sold his war by understating its cost by a factor of 28.57. Any financial officer anywhere in the world whose project was 2,857 percent over budget would instantly be fired for utter incompetence.
Bush's war cost almost 30 times more than he said it would because the moronic neoconservatives that he stupidly appointed to policy positions told him the invasion would be a cakewalk. Neocons promised minimal U.S. casualties. Iraq already has cost 2,200 dead Americans and 16,000 seriously wounded -- and Bush's war is not over yet. The cost of lifetime care and disability payments for the thousands of U.S. troops who have suffered brain and spinal damage was not part of the unrealistic rosy picture that Bush painted.
Stiglitz's $2 trillion estimate is OK as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far enough. My own estimate is a multiple of Stiglitz's.
Stiglitz correctly includes the cost of lifetime care of the wounded, the economic value of destroyed and lost lives, and the opportunity cost of the resources diverted to war destruction. What he leaves out is the war's diversion of the nation's attention away from the ongoing erosion of the U.S. economy. War and the accompanying domestic police state have filled the attention span of Americans and their government. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been rapidly deteriorating into Third World status.
In 2005, for the first time on record, consumer, business and government spending exceeded the total income of the country. Net national savings actually fell.
America can consume more than it produces only if foreigners supply the difference. China recently announced that it intends to diversify its foreign exchange holdings away from the U.S. dollar. If this is not merely a threat in order to extort even more concessions from Bush, Americans' ability to consume will be brought up short by a fall in the dollar's value, as China ceases to be a sponge that is absorbing an excessive outpouring of dollars. Oil-producing countries might follow China's lead.
Now that Americans are dependent on imports for their clothing, manufactured goods and even high technology products, a decline in the dollar's value will make all these products much more expensive. American living standards, which have been treading water, will sink.
A decline in living standards is an enormous cost and will make existing debt burdens unbearable. Stiglitz did not include this cost in his estimate.
Even more serious is the war's diversion of attention from the disappearance of middle-class jobs for university graduates. The ladders of upward mobility are being rapidly dismantled by offshore production for U.S. markets, job outsourcing and importation of foreign professionals on work visas. In almost every U.S. corporation, U.S. employees are being dismissed and replaced by foreigners who work for lower pay. Even American public school teachers and hospital nurses are being replaced by foreigners imported on work visas.
The American Dream has become a nightmare for college graduates who cannot find meaningful work.
This fact is made abundantly clear from the payroll jobs data over the past five years. December's numbers, released on Jan. 6, show the same pattern that I have reported each month for years. Under pressure from offshore outsourcing, the U.S. economy only creates low-productivity jobs in low-pay domestic services.
Only a paltry number of private sector jobs were created -- 94,000. Of these 94,000 jobs, 35,800 -- or 38 percent -- are for waitresses and bartenders. Health care and social assistance account for 28 percent of the new jobs, and temporary workers account for 10 percent. These three categories of low-tech, nontradable domestic services account for 76 percent of the new jobs. This is the jobs pattern of a poor Third World economy that consumes more than it produces.
America's so-called First World superpower economy was only able to create in December a measly 12,000 jobs in goods-producing industries, of which 77 percent are accounted for by wood products and fabricated metal products -- the furniture and roofing metal of the housing boom that has now come to an end. U.S. employment declined in machinery, electronic instruments, and motor vehicles and parts.
Two thousand six hundred jobs were created in computer systems design and related services, depressing news for the several hundred thousand unemployed American computer and software engineers.
When manufacturing leaves a country, engineering, R&D and innovation rapidly follow. Now that outsourcing has killed employment opportunities for U.S. citizens and even General Motors and Ford are failing, U.S. economic growth depends on how much longer the rest of the world will absorb our debt and finance our consumption.
How much longer will it be before "the world's only remaining superpower" is universally acknowledged as a debt-ridden, hollowed-out economy desperately in need of IMF bailout?
Mr. Roberts was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page from 1978 to 1980, and from 1981 to 1982, he was assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy.
We are doomed. Hopefully this genius is smart enough to move to France before our imminent collapse. Heck, I'll chip in for his plane fair.
Remember, Paul Craig Roberts was originally a Reaganite before Reagan was.
---President George W. Bush has destroyed America's economy---
At least you don't have to actually read the article to see that it's utter and total leftist fantasy!
talk about the Manchurian Candidate
Yep, and Scott Ritter was a staunch anti-saddamite before it was popular and David Brock was a memeber of the VRWC. ;o)
PCR lost his mind years ago.
Apparently there are still plenty of jobs for hack Communists...er, I mean columnists like this jerk.
If he thinks the cost of fighting the WOT is high, he'd better hope he never experiences the cost of losing it.....
Does Roberts now consider himself a leftist? He worked for Regan under Reagan. Or does he consider many of today's establishment conservatives to be leftists?
MSM's Hegemony Days are Over, Says Freeper
That was exactly my thought too. I kind of appreciated the author not wasting my time by letting me know that right up front.
Imagine gasoline @ $7 a gallon.
Good grief? Let whatzisface apply this cost analysis to the Korean War or even Reagan's '80s build up.
Quick...may I suggest a "Barf Alert" in the title?
Aging curmudgeon IronJack has calculated that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Universaity budget expert Linda Bilmes are irrelevant.
More people own their own homes than ever before.....
More people own stocks than ever before.....
More tax revenue is streaming into the federal coffers than ever before.....
Illegal aliens are risking their lives to enter the country for work....
Yeah....I guess the economy is shot..........
Harry Turman used to say that he'd like to meet an economist with one-hand. That way none could say "Well, Mr. President, on the other hand..."
Nothing has changed.
President Truman also used to be fond of saying this: "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." He loved to read history.
Meanwhile, the fellow from Harvard is incorrect. Unemployment is @ 4.9%, nearly 70% of America lives in its own house(that's not only a record for America, but for the world), and the cost of money is still at 40-year lows with virtually little or no inflation(depending on where you look). If you want work you can find it. All is well.
The deficit? President Reagan used to tell reporters, the deficit was big enough to take care of itself.
As for the war in Iraq, we are winning and that's for certain. It is not a popular war, but we have had many of those in our history. Most turned out to be beneficial.
President Bush is doing the right thing in Iraq because it is the difficult thing to do. Oftentimes in life, the easy thing, i.e., cut and run, is the wrong thing to do.
As for the rest of it and an exit strategy, please see my tagline.
We still do the R&D innovation,and engineering of products here, we just build them elsewhere.
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