The United States was born into debt. The long, expensive Revolutionary War devastated the infant nation's finances, and forced the United States to grapple with a primary public policy issue: How should debt and taxes be handled in the brave, new world of America?
Today, as the United States teeters on the edge of the fiscal cliff, Simon Johnson, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, describes America's love affair with debt and our longstanding hatred of taxes, in his recent book, "White House Burning."
While American history is full of historical parallels on managing the debt, Johnson says, "There's also some new territory here, because all the previous big run-ups, five big run-ups in debt in American history, were all about wars or other forms of national emergency. The difference here is we have an aging population, aging society. We just had a massive financial crisis, and it's a compounding of those elements."
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly added to the current debt crisis, Johnson explains, "But that's not what's really propelled us to this difficult fiscal moment. It's much more about domestic decisions, and difficulties around deciding who's going to pay what in, and who's going to get what out."
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The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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Comments [5]
Views that irony is new to America are uninformed.
Start with our founding fathers
Benj Franklin, James Otis, Thomas Paine
Continue on to
Washington Irving
Mark Twain
Thos. Bailey Aldrich
Ambrose Bierce
George Ade
Booth Tarkington
Abe Lincoln
HL Mencken
These had great sophistication about human nature and in some cases about culture as well.
Now we have partisan Maureen Dowd and partisan who is just too Goodie Two Shoes cute.
Many who now lean to irony are simply tiresome. They have plenty of detachment from everything not theirs, but rarely much sophistication or exposure to life.
The love affair with debt was imposed on me...
I dont want to sound like an inglorious bastard but i suspect that whoever is in control of the money in the world plays like they're been nice to the poor by not taking wven more monwy so they after the rich"they have more to steal from".. and since the rich have a louder voice it echos all thru the united states, these devils who insist in filling their vaults with money laugh at the ignorance that we have imposed on or selves...but to the weak and poor in everything the only answer i have for them is what a king told me once... boycott.
I am reminded of the poem that goes approximately
"As I was going down the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh how I wish he'd go away"
The point being the possibility that so many people fear we now face The Great Wile E Coyote Moment, that it becomes The Great Wile E Coyote Moment. Out of thin air, as it were.
Certainly this whole vast system of cross-collateralized debt is bound to collapse eventually. The events of a couple of years ago were like a warning heart attack, with desperate defibrillation and the whole bit. But I was thinking our fat and comfortable debt-addiction could lurch on for at least another decade. Maybe not.
Isn't this a rather dishonest conversation.
Pelosi, Reid and Obama authorized and supported the spending of trillions of dollars with no serious budget and no serious way to pay it back. They could have raised taxes and the debt ceiling as high as they wanted in 2010 but manufactured a crisis with the incoming Republican House for selfish political purposes.
Sadly this political treachery has worked for the benefit of their party at the expense of the nation.
They and their minions derided and defamed anyone who opposed this much spending at this speed and all of this is now forgotten as the media crudely tries to revise and spin very recent history.
I understand that 47 cents out of every dollar the government spends is borrowed. Do we really think we can continue in this line? (That's why the Republicans are holding out for spending cuts, as difficult as they will be.)
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