Sheriff’s Sale
By Johnny Roosh
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?
July 16th, 2008 at 10:10 am
I keep hearing liberals howling about the national debt as a readon to repeal the Bush tax cuts.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am
It’s a tough question. It’s not as if China could call the note and we’d have to fork over Connecticut. My understanding has been that money flows to the U.S. because our economy, for all its current issues, is a better bet than just about anyplace else in the world. The only way we endanger that is by making ourselves less productive. To the extent that productivity is a public policy matter (and I’m plenty skeptical about that), the best thing government can do is be minimally intrusive.
That’s why I always get nervous when Democrats and their friends talk about public-private partnerships, joint ventures, etc. That’s how we got Fannie and Freddie.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Your friend has a point but, in the big picture, he’s wrong. We were more secure when we had a balanced budget and surplus at the end of the Clinton years. While the U.S. is, in a sense, too big to fail, we are not too big to lose control of our economic destiny, bit by bit, or to be forced into compromising important geopolitical goals to maintain our economic stability. I think Bush, a slow learner if ever there was one, is coming around to that realization, with no time left to do anything meaningful about it.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I agree with AC. Your friend is using the “there’s always a bigger fool” fallacy. Too much debt constrains your degrees of freedom, both at a personal level and at a national level. In the case of our national debt most of it isn’t used to enhance production that might be used to justify the debt, but rather for high living. We’re doing the national equivalent of running up the credit cards on dining out rather than borrowing to build factories.
It’s nice to see that AC is a conservative — a fiscal conservative, at least. (Did I just cause him to explode?)
July 16th, 2008 at 11:31 am
We were more secure when we had a balanced budget and surplus at the end of the Clinton years.
Which is to say the Clinton administration was the benefactor of the tax cuts made during the Reagan administration.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am
he Clinton administration was the benefactor of the tax cuts
To say nothing of being able to cash in the Peace Dividend, which was a Reagan thing from dollar one.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:57 am
AC is right the banker (china, russia, india, saudi arabia,etc) won’t CALL the loan outright but they can and will show up late at night for booty calls on segments of our economy and rather than risk them calling the loan we’ll end up giving it to them – its called slicing the salami (“just one tiny slice – no one will notice”).
Fiscally the most conservative/Republican president we’ve had in the last 20 years was Bill Clinton
July 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Angryclown is neither a liberal nor a conservative. Angryclown is too smart for either camp and therefore belongs to the Angryclown Party.
Angryclown does recognize that, in present company, he may be viewed as relatively liberal. But then so would anyone whose first name isn’t “Darth.”
July 16th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Conservatives such as yourself have a lot of nerve suggesting that conservatism is the answer for our financial woes. President Bush has the dubious distinction of being the only president to lead us into war while simultaneously cutting taxes. Republicans in Congress fought tooth and nail against returning to pay-as-you-go rules. Do you really want to have that debate?
On a less cranky note, regarding the debt, our monstrous debt does not make us safer. One of Alexander Hamilton’s reasons for initially allowing the federal government to deficit-spend, however, was that we’d be more secure if other countries had a stake in our success. Having a debt is generally good for security. Being mortgaged to the hilt to China, not so much.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
For the last few years at least, being Republican has DEFINITELY not meant being Conservative as far as our elected officials go.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Conservatives such as yourself have a lot of nerve suggesting that conservatism is the answer for our financial woes.
We wouldn’t know, Jeff. It hasn’t been tried since the mid 1990s.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Conservatives such as yourself have a lot of nerve suggesting that conservatism is the answer for our financial woes. President Bush has the dubious distinction of being the only president to lead us into war while simultaneously cutting taxes.
Not to pile on but you almost wrote “conservative” and “President Bush” in the same sentence. I would advise you not to do that in the future.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
“Compassionate conservative” GWB certainly isn’t a movement conservative: he’s a big-government conservative not too dissimilar to his father and very different than Reagan, who was more libertarian in his outlook. That he and the GOP were all too willing to spend like 60s and 70s Democrats was to their shame. I’m coming to the conclusion that divided government is necessary for any sort of fiscal responsibility.
But then so would anyone whose first name isn’t “Darth.”
Darth Nerdbert, eh? My kids will get a kick out of that, especially with the popularity at our house of Lego Starwars. Maybe I should change my handle here.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Boy, with friends like you guys, who needs enemies?
You threw ol’ “W” under the bus pretty quick.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Jeff,
Nope. Not at all. I’m reiterating criticicms I had of W eight, count ’em, eight years ago, when I was in the Forbes/Kemp camp. Some of us knew he wasn’t a fiscal conservative.
W has his strenghs; whatever his weaknesses, he’s a better president than either Algore or Kerry would have been.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
There is an old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars and can’t pay you are in trouble. If you owe the bank a Billion dollars and can’t pay the BANK is in trouble.
That said I recall in the 70’s we were all going to be bought, owned and working for the Japanense, in the 80’s it was the Saudi’s. So pardon me if i don’t panic this time around. We can crash and burn but i wouldn’t worry about it just yet. Maybe if the tan skinny kid gets elected we may be in trouble in four years. But I’ve seen this before, and your ipod may be made in China, but Apple is still a US company. Mitch you especially should know we are moving from a heavy industry high manual labor economy to a creative inventive mental and automated labor economy.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
You threw ol’ “W” under the bus pretty quick.
No, some of us had limited support for W from the start and have made that quite clear. He did the right things after 9/11, he’s been dogged in his prosecution of the war, but he did a poor job communicating what and why he was doing what he was doing. He made some very poor decisions after the Iraq war and it’s only with the surge he came back to a good policy and tactics.
But he wasn’t a fiscal conservative by any means. And he expanded the role of government immensely, he helped the GOP spend like a drunken Democrat, he blatantly lied about his Medicare expansions, he neglected to get consensus on how to conduct the war, etc.
Was he the best choice available? Yes. But given the choices, that’s like saying that Wendy’s make the best burgers when the other choice is White Castle.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:53 am
“W has his strenghs”
Best chugger in his frat, baby!
You’ll want to keep him away from the pretzels, though.
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 pm
[…] Sometimes I just can’t help but respond to the local conservative blogs. Roosh at Shot in the Dark seriously believes conservatives have the answer to our national debt problem: 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. […]
August 3rd, 2008 at 9:05 pm
…nice hit and run. If you hung round here (Shot in the Dark) long enough you’d know that by no means do I or those that I run with consider “W” to be a fiscal conservative and by no means our fiscal hero.
Sorry, but I just emptied your glass.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:44 pm
I’m gonna have to set Jeff straight later this week.