Plymouth, Minnesota: Money Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Live, August 2008 Issue

Some selected stats, however, may not bode well…

Plymouth, MN vs. Best Places Average

Sales Tax:  6.65 vs. 6.60% (Baseball in the freezing rain anyone?)

State Income Tax Rate: 7.85% vs. 5.17% (Highest Bracket)

State Income Tax Rate: 5.35% vs. 2.43% (Lowest Bracket) (That’s not a typo…their lowest is higher than the average highest)

Job Growth 7.89% vs. 18.72% (Anyone think taxes may have anything to do with this?)

Average Property Taxes $4526 vs. $3886

Topnotch schools, good jobs, affordable housing, low crime, an active outdoor culture – yep, they’re pretty much all here. Plymouth could have become just another Twin Cities suburb, but more than 50,000 jobs keep residents working there.

And they’re paying for it too!

I had a lively meeting yesterday with a client and friend with whom I share many values but also a respectful but opposite polarity politically.

As we sat at a Caribou Coffee (which is owned by an Islamic bank; a known supporter of the Palestinians –  but they have more locations that Starbucks – I digress) our conversation weaved around multiple topics on the political landscape and arrived at our national debt.

I maintain that our deficit spending habits and their product, our national debt  have left our country in an increasingly precarious position and is in fact an issue of national security.

The extrapolation of the mathematics, an element of which is our evolving demographics (i.e. more people getting on the wagon and less people pushing it) will eventually result in a national financial meltdown and the collapse of the American dollar.

Liberals oft cited moral imperative to be a compassionate, civilized nation manifested in layers and layers of entitlements will be eclipsed by the fact that at some point we will simply be unable to service our debt let alone borrow more.

Soon we will all be conservatives. Fiscally-speaking that is. The question of what our federal government should or should not do for it’s citizens will become an academic discussion.

(catching my breath)

My colleague countered that he is of the understanding, and has read that in fact that the opposite is true. He maintains that so many nations are owed so much by we Yanks that no nation in their right mind could or would bear the brunt of an American default and the resultant Sheriff’s sale.

It would be financial suicide. (Little consolation in a world where suicide is in fact an acceptable risk, even a tactical element for our most feared enemies).

Nonetheless, I had never heard that before.

I try to keep an open mind. My brief and by no means exhaustive research on the topic (I Googled it) yielded nothing in support the position of my esteemed companion in caffeine. Could this be true? Or is it simply a rationalization of our current predicament and an endorsement to carry on?

Do liberals actually believe that we are more secure in the global economy as a debtor nation?