The increasing dependence of the United States on borrowing from foreign countries is alarming, and the speed with which it has accelerated during the last three years is an even greater red flag. To understand the nature and depth of the problem, we need to do a little arithmetic.
So foreigners have gone from owning $1.3 trillion at the beginning of the decade to now owning $3.3 trillion of such securities — a $2 trillion increase. More important and interesting than that, of the $2.8 trillion in net new issuances of Treasury securities during this decade, foreigners have bought $2.0 of the $2.8 trillion, a stunning 71%. (China alone appears to have bought over one third of the total of foreign purchases.) Who will purchase the debt to fund the upcoming $10 trillion in deficits is anyone’s guess, as the bond market seems to have figured out.
Foreigners increased their purchases of Treasuries by only $2 trillion during this decade — and yet we expect them to purchase perhaps as much as $7 trillion of new deficit debt over the next decade? That seems impossible.
Put it another way. The US government is grossly negligent in creating the conditions that necessitate America’s importing up to 70% of its oil, making the country dependent on countries that are strategic adversaries. Now we also import 70% of the financing of the US government’s budget deficits, again making America dependent on potential adversaries or enemies. This can’t end well. Where are the serious men to address these strategic vulnerabilities?
Jeffrey Anderson points out just how bad things are going to get if we stay on this course:
Obama is responsible for $4.4 trillion in actual or projected deficit spending in just three years in office..At the end of 2008, just before President Obama took office, the national debt was $9.986 trillion and 69 percent of GDP. Under his projections, eight years later it will be $20.825 trillion and 104 percent of GDP. That’s right: Our debt will soon exceed our national economic output for an entire year. And that’s even if you believe the president’s rosy projections of 4 percent real GDP growth over the next four years, considerably higher than the 2.7 percent achieved over the past quarter-century and the 3.2 percent over the past half-century…
interest payments on the debt are on course to triple from 2010 (his first budgetary year) to 2018, climbing from $196 billion to $685 billion annually. Under his projections for 2018, interest payments on the debt will exceed all defense spending, including wartime spending. Think about that: In the first budgetary year after the next presidential term, our creditors are projected to get more money than our military.
It’s amazing, when you think about, that America could be facing this level of catastrophe and most of the media simply ignore the issue.
We haven’t had very much to say about Egypt. We haven’t watched TV news on the subject. We’ve read a lot of course, including accounts from educated and goodhearted Egyptian participants in the demonstrations (here and here, for example), and some Americans watching Egyptians and getting the vapors. We’ve read realpolitik views of the situation, and people who blame Israel or the US itself for the situation.
We don’t have answers, but we have a few questions. Chief among them: if Mubarak has been a US ally for 30 years, why did the US ditch him after a week of street protests? Is US foreign policy that feckless? America has few enough allies in the Middle East. If US foreign policy can be turned on its head by TV coverage of a week or two of protests, why would anyone want to be an ally of the US? It seems that we are not the only ones asking this question.
UPDATE
From a report on NPR about unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere:
In the past six months, the price of wheat and corn has nearly doubled in many parts of the world. And in areas where people spend as much as half their income on food, that’s making it very hard for people to feed their families…on corn, we’ve seen those commodity prices increase about 75 to 80 percent, wheat has increased about 75 to 80 percent in the last six months, and rice has gone up about 50 percent
Last month the NYT reported that in 2007 and 2008 there were food riots in Egypt. And things have apparently gotten much worse now for the many Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day. Did you know that the State Department says that over 40% of adult Egyptians are illiterate? There are plenty of reasons for disquiet and unrest besides those based on the TV interviews of young, urban, university-educated Egyptians who speak English. But perhaps that would overly complicate the storyline.
A monk’s living quarters are called a cell. In Bhutan, monks can trade one type of cell for another. Reuters:
A Buddhist monk could face five years in prison after becoming the first casualty of a stringent anti-smoking law in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan…The monk has been charged with consuming and smuggling contraband tobacco under a law that came into force this month…having been caught in possession of 72 packets of chewing tobacco. Bhutan, where smoking is considered bad for one’s karma, banned the sale of tobacco in 2005.
Fouad Ajami reviews violence and revolts in Egypt’s past and comments on the troubles today. WSJ:
It is hard to know with precision when Hosni Mubarak, the son of middle peasantry, lost the warrant of his people. It had started out well for this most cautious of men. He had been there on the reviewing stand on Oct. 6, 1981 when a small band of young men from the army struck down Sadat as the flamboyant ruler was reviewing his troops and celebrating the eighth anniversary of the October War of 1973.
The new man had risen by grace of his predecessor’s will. He had had no political past. The people of Egypt had not known of him. He was the antidote to two great and ambitious figures — Nasser and Sadat. His promise was modesty…But the appetite grew with the eating…
In the annals of Muslim dynasties and kingdoms, wives and children have figured prominently in the undoing of rulers. An ambitious wife, Suzanne, with haughty manners, and a taste for wealth and power (a variation on the hairdresser Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the deposed Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) and a favored son who, by all indications, was preparing to inherit his father’s power, deepened the estrangement between Mr. Mubarak and his people.
Egypt had been the trendsetter in Arab politics, in its self-image the place where all things modern in Arab life — the cinema, radio, women’s emancipation, parliamentary life, mass politics, forced industrialization — had begun. The sight of Tunisians, hitherto a marginal people in the Arab consciousness, taking to the streets and deposing their tyrant, both shamed and emboldened the Egyptians.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that in December 2008 the State Department was aware of a claim that “the Wafd, Nasserite, Karama and Tagammu parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Kifaya, and Revolutionary Socialist movements — have agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections.”
The occasion of Egypt’s troubles reminds us of a 2004 interview of the Vice President, who was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden said: “We ought to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with an old friend, and he is a friend who occasionally calls me at home — I always know it’s him when he says, “Joe, it’s Mubarak. What are you doing?”
In a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland / WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 1000 Egyptian Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007, 67% of those interviewed — more than 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority” — desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”). The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 74% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”
the military is in power in Egypt. Mubarak is a military man. Sadat was a military man. Nasser was a military man. If the military stays in power, in selecting one of its own to be president, I think everything stays in place and that would mean that the regime survives. It’s far more significant if the normal succession within the framework of the military doesn’t happen. One of the reasons that Gamal Mubarak was not going to be allowed by the military to take power is that he wasn’t part of the military the same way his father was. He wasn’t trusted by them. So, the issue here is a succession within the framework of the military.
We have no idea how this will end, but there appear to be powerful forces arrayed on both sides, the military establishment versus what looks like majority support for the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood.
1968 was a tumultuous year, really awful in some ways, hardly what you’d call the good old days. Yet it had its moments, including the first human spaceflight to leave the earth’s orbit. Merry Christmas from the astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission.
You’ve heard of suicide by cop. Consider this — the Climategate folks may have committed suicide by chart. To paraphrase Freud, despite our best efforts to conceal, confession oozes from every pore.
Everyone is familiar with the famous and alarming hockey stick graph. But hidden in plain sight in that chart is the disappearance of the Medieval Warm Period, when the weather became so warm that the Vikings were able to sail to Newfoundland. Making that well-documented period disappear from the chart looks in retrospect like a cry for help.
As for the silliness about CO2, remember the lesson of the Tiffany boxes. (Regarding the underlying issue, we’re somewhat agnostic as to whether warming or cooling is currently going on; we also regard the matter as overblown in the sense that there is no way that the biggest polluter is going to trade one decimal point of GDP growth for emission reduction, which renders the international policy debate moot.)
The NYT warned us that Granny would be recruited to blow things up. Not quite yet apparently. (We think there’s a lady in here somewhere, but it isn’t Granny.)
assuming elderly white women from Iowa are more technically proficient than the Muslim male shoe bomber and underwear bomber, and are not grounded by a fear of flying, some inducement would have to be offered to persuade elderly white women from Iowa to undertake suicide missions. Unlike the Muslim male candidates offered 40 awaiting virgins in paradise, elderly white women from Iowa presumably are not Muslim and have no need of virgins. Nor is ideology a likely incentive, since al Qaeda makes few provisions for women’s rights, senior citizen discounts, or the extension of Medicare benefits.
It is so very strange that the precise purpose of manhandling the elderly is to avoid offending people who fit the profile of known terrorists. As Taranto quipped: “The government treats Americans like terrorists — and terrorists like Americans.” We continue to be amazed that 4 in 10 Americans continue to support these clowns.
Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”
Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country
If terrorists are clever enough to hide powerful explosives in ink cartridges, then eventually they’ll find a suicide bomber who looks just like you, me or Granny.
Is he serious? Grandma? Can he possibly believe this? Apparently yes.
John Pistole told USA TODAY that some terrorists consider subway and rail cars an easier target than heavily secured planes. “Given the list of threats on subways and rails over the last six years going on seven years, we know that some terrorist groups see rail and subways as being more vulnerable because there’s not the type of screening that you find in aviation,” he said. “From my perspective, that is an equally important threat area.”…
Pistole said he wants TSA workers, including 47,000 screeners at 450 airports, to operate as a “national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts.” “I want to take TSA to the next level,” Pistole said.
It is interesting that Pistole was not Obama’s first choice for TSA director. His first choice had some troubling issues in his past. So did his second choice. Perhaps the third time was the charm. We just have to see whether Pistole’s desire to put priority on rail and subway travel results in an increase in TSA inspections in those venues.
Ok, so you’re an “extremist” who, for totally unknown and unknowable reasons, wants to perpetrate a man-caused disaster by wearing a nasty version of Depends on an airliner. Your first option today is to go through any airport security checkpoint that does not yet feature the X-ray machines. You’re home free, while regular Americans are harassed. Double plus good.
But eventually, it is said, the X-ray machines will be ubiquitous and universal, so you won’t be able to bypass them. What then? Since you are a suicidal maniac for some reason or other, you’ll do what you need to do, namely put the PETN where the sun don’t shine and accept the patdown. Question: assuming that happens, what does the TSA then do? We’re asking the question in all seriousness.
There would then appear to be only a couple of options: (a) cavity searches for all passengers; or (b) profiling. Since (a) is not going to happen, why doesn’t the government use (b) now? Why wait? TSA inspections do not prevent anything; they merely cause the perps to take steps to circumvent them. The logic of the current TSA screening protocol suggests that some Americans will have to be killed or injured before the obvious step of profiling takes place? Does this make any sense at all?
Air travellers could face even more intrusive security checks amid fears that Al Qaeda is planning a terror campaign using suicide bombers carrying explosives hidden in their bodies. The body bomb threat was revealed after the tactic was used in an assassination attempt on a Saudi prince…
The dilemma is that explosives inserted into body cavities like the stomach or rectum, or even implanted surgically, cannot be detected by regular airport checks. But draconian and potentially costly measures such as full X-ray screening or a requirement for all passengers to hand in electronic equipment that could possibly be used as detonators would cause chaos and massive delays…
“Our aviation controls are equipped with metal detectors, but in the case of the Saudi suicide bomber only an X-ray control would have detected the explosive,” a French official told Le Figaro newspaper. But a French Interior Ministry official said X-raying every passenger would be unthinkable. “The health risks would be too high,” he added.
So X-ray scanners, with their “health risks,” only work if you can’t opt out of them. The “love pats” that the government praises can’t detect internal bombs. And what happens when some groups are exempted altogether?
Just so we understand: if the Daily Mail is correct, this government program is intrusitve, offensive, expensive and ineffective all at once. Did we get that right?
News from San Diego — the government doesn’t much like uppity citizens:
The Transportation Security Administration has opened an investigation targeting John Tyner, the Oceanside man who left Lindbergh Field under duress on Saturday morning after refusing to undertake a full body scan. Tyner recorded the half-hour long encounter on his cell phone and later posted it to his personal blog, along with an extensive account of the incident. The blog went viral, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of comments.
Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, called a news conference at the airport Monday afternoon to announce the probe. He said the investigation could lead to prosecution and civil penalties of up to $11,000. TSA agents had told Tyner on Saturday that he could be fined up to $10,000. “That’s the old fine,” Aguilar said. “It has been increased.”
Tyner has a point, as the hundreds of saved body scans (grossout alert!) testify. Screening for weapons originated in the US in around 1969, the year that apparently 82 airplanes were hijacked, many of them to Cuba. But now, at long last, things have gone too far.
It is long past time for profiling, or at least anti-profiling of airline passengers. (Is there a reason a flight attendant needs to get naked before she can go to work, or that a guy with 9 million miles on American Airlines needs to be groped, or that an octogenarian grandma needs any inspection at all?) But that would require common sense. What are the chances of that when even the AP understands more about our adversaries than does the administration?
“It was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead,” Obama said. “Being my brother’s and sister’s keeper.”
This is doubly funny. It was of course Cain who said to God “Am I my brother’s keeper?” in an episode that didn’t work out all that well for Abel. On the other hand, the President’s brother George would probably like a little of the aid the President seemed to offer.
It is easy to see how a nuclear Iran could change the dynamics of oil prices and regional politics if it held blackmail power over the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40% of seaborne traded oil flows. Michael J. Totten interviewed Martin Kramer about the need for the US (a) to make sure that Iran does not go nuclear, and (b) for Israel not to take that action unilaterally:
Iran knows it can’t wrest sole hegemony in the Gulf from the United States, but it wants to create a kind of dual hegemony shared with the United States. Nobody knows where the lines would run, but they wouldn’t run just five to ten miles off the coast of Iran into the waters of the Persian Gulf. Iran would like to see its share extend to both sides of the Gulf, to effectively create a kind of push and shove between the United States and Iran…
When the British left the Gulf in the early 1970s, the Americans weren’t in a position to pick it up because they were busy in Vietnam. They had their dual pillars in the Gulf, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but one of them collapsed in 1979. And since that collapse, there has been no equivalent of Israel in the Gulf which the United States could use as a fulcrum around which to organize a region. So the pillar of stability has been the American deployment of its own forces again and again and again. They’ve put millions of boots on the ground, and it’s still not enough…
The Gulf is a zone of American dominance, and the only way to assert that is to do what Carter did with the Carter Doctrine, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. He said there should be no outside power or local power that is allowed to challenge the United States in the Gulf. And a nuclear Iran clearly crosses that line. If even Jimmy Carter was compelled to issue a doctrinal statement in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan about the Persian Gulf, one would think that Barack Obama would see the need to do something similar…
It would be an astonishing lapse if a man who promised to roll back nuclear proliferation watched proliferation develop in one of the least stable parts of the world, a place where the United States has only been able to maintain even a modicum of stability by a massive projection of its own forces. The region is of prime interest to the entire world for its energy resources. If it becomes nuclearized, it will be the one thing for which Barack Obama would always be remembered by history
The reason for the inclusion of the map above is this: the little area of the Strait of Hormuz is perhaps the most critical chokepoint of global commerce. Now consider this: the US imports 70% of its oil and has a mere 35 days supply in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. By contrast, in 1973, at the time of the first, and highy disruptive Arab oil embargo, US imports comprised only 35% of total oil consumption. This doesn’t add up. Who’s minding the store?
There are a couple of things that seem really odd about the dust-up on The View and the firing of Juan Williams. The first is that Bill O’Reilly said something that the vast majority of Americans have said they agree with. Though no one to our knowledge has conducted a poll on Williams’ comments, we would bet that most Americans agree with him too. So what gives with the hysterical reactions of the ladies on The View and the CEO of NPR? The women seem so brittle they just might break.
Wretchard had a piece on the subject that brought up the Larry Summers controversy from five years ago, and the similarly hysterical reaction of Nancy Hopkins of MIT. What’s up with these ladies that their reaction to politically incorrect (if not particularly controversial) statements is to get a bad case of the vapors? Corresponding question: would a man act like any of these women?
The NYT‘s review of Wikileaks documents shows significant Iranian military involvement in Iraq, and that the change of administrations did nothing to stop it.
On Dec. 22, 2006, American military officials in Baghdad issued a secret warning: The Shiite militia commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping of officials from Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education was now hatching plans to take American soldiers hostage.
What made the warning especially worrying were intelligence reports saying that the Iraqi militant, Azhar al-Dulaimi, had been trained by the Middle East’s masters of the dark arts of paramilitary operations: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally.
“Dulaymi reportedly obtained his training from Hizballah operatives near Qum, Iran, who were under the supervision of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF) officers in July 2006,” the report noted…
Five months later, Mr. Dulaimi was tracked down and killed in an American raid in the sprawling Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad — but not before four American soldiers had been abducted from an Iraqi headquarters in Karbala and executed in an operation that American military officials say literally bore Mr. Dulaimi’s fingerprints…
attacks continued during Mr. Obama’s first year in office, with no indication in the reports that the new administration’s policies led the Quds Force to end its support for Iraqi militants. The pending American troop withdrawals, the reports asserted, may even have encouraged some militant attacks.
We noted the abduction of the four soldiers at the time — it was a rather complex and sophisticated operation involving Iranian soldiers who spoke English and used stolen American equipment. It would be nice to know if the US took any aggressive measures to deal with what appear to be clear acts of war on the part of Iran against the United States.
