After America Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE - THE NEW ROME

  CRESCENT MOON

  GOTTERDAMMERUNG

  THE HOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

  CHAPTER TWO - UNDREAMING AMERICA

  THE STATIST QUO

  TWO SOLITUDES

  FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS MONEY

  THE BUREAU OF COMPLIANCE

  AS UNAMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

  BULLS IN A CHINA SHOP

  SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

  CHAPTER THREE - THE NEW ATHENS

  THE GREEK BONE CONNECTED TO THE KRAUT BONE

  THE KRAUT BONE CONNECTED TO THE YANK BONE

  THE YANK BONE CONNECTED TO . . . ?

  CHAPTER FOUR - DECLINE

  THE UTOPIA OF MYOPIA

  CELEBRATE YOURSELF

  THE STUDENT PRINCES

  THE FEELIES

  WE ARE THE WORLD ...

  ... WE ARE THE CHILDREN

  BOY MEETS GIRL

  NO MAN’S LAND

  CHAPTER FIVE - THE NEW BRITANNIA

  AFTER THE BALL

  WORLD WITHOUT WANT

  THE LOTTERY OF LIFE

  CHAPTER SIX - FALL

  THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  SEE THE U.S.A. IN YOUR CHEVROLET

  BIG LOVE

  DEPENDISTAN

  THE KINGDOM OF THE BONOBO

  SPLITSVILLE

  BORDER COUNTRY

  DESTINY’S MANIFEST

  SHADOWLANDS

  COUGAR TOWN

  CHAPTER SEVEN - THE NEW JERUSALEM

  THE NEW NORMALIUT

  CHAPTER EIGHT - AFTER

  IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY

  FIVE BILLION GUYS NAMED MO

  DARKNESS FALLS

  AFTER MAN

  THE SOMALIFICATION OF THE WORLD

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  THE STUPIDITY OF BROKE

  There is the moral of all human tales;

  ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,

  First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,

  Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.

  —Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818)

  The sun’ll come out tomorrow

  Bet your bottom dollar

  That tomorrow there’ll be sun

  —Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin, Annie (1977)

  Previously on Apocalypse Soon ...

  It was the worst of times, it was the not quite so worst of times.

  The predecessor to this book was called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and, given the title, you may be tempted to respond, “C’mon, man. You told us last time it was the end of the world. Well, where the hell is it? I want my money back. Instead, you come breezing in with this season’s Armageddonouttahere routine. It’s like Barbra Streisand farewell tours—there’ll be another along next summer.”

  Well, now: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was about the impending collapse of all of the western world except America.

  The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule.

  The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.

  Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check. But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program but supersized. Heigh-ho.

  It starts with the money. In “The Run Upon the Bankers” (1720), Jonathan Swift wrote:A baited banker thus desponds,

  From his own hand foresees his fall,

  They have his soul, who have his bonds;

  ’Tis like the writing on the wall.

  A lot of writing on the wall these days. Who has the bonds of a “developed world” developed to the point that it’s institutionally conditioned to living beyond its means? Foreigners with money. So who’s available and flush enough? The Chinese Politburo; Saudi sheikhs lubricated with oil but with lavish worldwide ideological proselytizing to fund; Russian “businessmen.”. . . These are not the fellows one might choose to have one’s bonds, never mind one’s soul, but there aren’t a lot of other options.

  So it starts with the money—dry stuff about numbers and percentage of GDP. As Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado fumed to a room of voters in 2010, “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it.”1

  He’s right—and $13 trillion is the lowest of lowball estimates. But why then did Senator Bennet vote for the “stimulus” and ObamaCare and all the other trillion-dollar binges his party blew through? Why did Senator Bennet string along and let the 111 th Congress (2009–2011) run up more debt than the first one hundred Congresses (1789–1989) combined?2 Panicked by pre-election polls into repudiating everything he’d been doing for the previous two years, the senator left it mighty late to rediscover his virtue. You would think that Colorado voters might have remembered that, like Groucho Marx apropos Doris Day, they knew Michael Bennet before he was a virgin. Alas, an indulgent electorate permitted the suddenly abstemious spendaholic to squeak back into office.

  And, contra Senator Bennet, eventually you do have something to show for it. It starts with the money, but it doesn’t stop there. It ends with a ruined and reprimitivized planet, in fewer easy stages than you might expect.

  Let’s take a thought by the economist Herbert Stein:If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.3

  This is a simple but profound observation. Dr. Stein first used it in the context of the long-ago debts and deficits of the Reagan era. “The Federal debt cannot rise forever relative to the GNP. Our foreign debt cannot rise forever relative to the GNP,” he said. “But, of course, if they can’t, they will stop.” It was, as he later wrote, “a response to those who think that if something cannot go on forever, steps must be taken to stop it—even to stop it at once.”4 And he has a point: if something can’t go on, you don’t have to figure out a way to stop it, because it’s going to stop anyway.

  Eventually.

  As you might have noticed, since he first made the observation, the debt has gone on rising, very dramatically. But the truth is unarguable. If you’re careening along a road toward a collapsed bridge, you’ll certainly stop, one way or the other. But it makes a difference, at least to you, whether you skid to a halt four yards before the cliff edge or whether you come to rest at the bottom of the ravine.

  In 2010, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), described current U.S. deficits as “unsustainable.”5 On that everyone’s agreed. So let’s make them even more so! On assuming office, President Obama assured us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible wastrel of a predecessor had taken the federal budget on an eight-year joyride. So the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor could get things under control was to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.” Let’s head for the washed-out bridge, but at Obamacrous Speed!

  The Spendballs plans of the Obama administration took the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008 and doubled it, all the way to 2020.6 “We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves ou
t of,” the president declared in 2011.7 Usually, when you’re in a hole, it’s a good idea to stop digging. But, seemingly, to get out of the Bush hole, we needed to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of the president’s economics czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2020, the actual hole will be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent.8 That’s crazy. Obama’s solution was to attempt to crank it up to 25 to 30 percent as a permanent feature of life. That’s load up the suicide-bomber underpants and pass me the matches.

  The CBO doesn’t put it quite like that. Musing on the likelihood of a sudden fiscal crisis, it murmurs blandly, “The exact point at which such a crisis might occur for the United States is unknown, in part because the ratio of federal debt to GDP is climbing into unfamiliar territory.”9

  But it’ll get real familiar real soon. A lot of the debate about America’s date with destiny has an airy-fairy beyond-the-blue-horizon mid-century quality, all to do with long-term trends and other remote indicators. In fact, we’ll be lucky to make it through the short-term in sufficient shape to get finished off by the long-term. According to CBO projections, by 2055 interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues.10 But I don’t think 11

  So take your eye off the far prospect, and instead look about fourteen inches in front of your toecap. Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military. You read that right: more on debt service than on the armed services. According to the CBO’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest. 12 Whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent.

  Just to clarify: we’re not talking about paying down the federal debt, just keeping up with the annual interest charges on it. Yet within a decade the United States will be paying more in interest payments than it pays for the military—and that’s not because the Pentagon is such a great bargain. In 2009, the United States accounted for over 43 percent of the world’s military expenditures.13 So America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have evolved from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers. The CBO numbers foresee net interest payments rising from 9 percent of revenue to 36 percent in 2030, then to 58 percent in 2040, and up to 85 percent in 2050.14 If that trajectory holds, we’ll be spending more than the planet’s entire military budget on debt interest.

  But forget mid-century—because, unless something changes, whatever goes by the name of “America” under those conditions isn’t worth talking about.

  By 2010, about half our debt was owned by foreigners, and somewhere over a quarter of that was held by the Chinese (officially).15

  What does that mean? In 2010, the U.S. spent about $663 billion on its military, China about $78 billion.16 If the People’s Republic carries on buying 17

  Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.

  To return to the president’s declared strategy: “We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves out of.” Every politician’s First Rule of Holes used to be: When you’re in one, stop digging. If you don’t, as every child knows, eventually you dig so deep you come out on the other side of the world—someplace like, oh, China. By 2015 or so, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers.18 As Bugs Bunny is wont to say when his tunnel comes out somewhere unexpected: “I musta took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.” Indeed. When the Commies take Taiwan, suburban families in Albuquerque and small businesses in Pocatello will have paid for it.

  And even that startling scenario is premised on the most optimistic assumptions—of resumed economic growth but continued low interest rates. If interest rates were to return to, say, 5.7 percent (the average for the period 1990–2010), the debt service projections for 2015 would increase from $290 billion to $847 billion.19 China would be in a position to quadruple its military budget and stick U.S. taxpayers with the bill.

  The existential questions for America loom not decades hence, but right now. It is not that we are on a luge ride to oblivion but that the prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.

  It starts with the money. It always does. P. G. Wodehouse fans will recall the passage in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Bertie Wooster’s uncle, like many Americans today, is much preoccupied by the Exchequer’s claim upon him:

  “Is he still upset about that income-tax money?” asks Bertie.

  “Upset is right,” replies Aunt Dahlia. “He says that Civilization is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”

  “What wall?”

  “Old Testament, ass,” snaps Aunt Dahlia. “Belshazzar’s feast.”

  “Oh, that, yes,” says Bertie. “I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With mirrors, I expect.”

  The gag with mirrors comes from the Book of Daniel: Babylon’s king throws a wild party and, in the midst of his drunkenness, toasts the gods of gold, silver, and various other commodities. No sooner has he done so than the writing appears on the wall, spelling out with disembodied fingers “mene mene, tekel, upharsin.” They’re currency units: half-dollar, half-dollar, penny, and two bits. But what does it mean? None of the A-list seers Belshazzar keeps on the payroll has a clue what it portends, so the King calls in Daniel the Jew to explain things, which he does, very bluntly:

  Mene: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.”

  Tekel: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

  Upharsin: “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”

  Within twenty-four hours, Belshazzar is slain and Darius the Mede is king.

  Today, the units are larger than in Babylon: “Mene mene, tekel, upharsin” is now trillion trillion, billion, half-trillion. But the upshot’s the same. We’ve spent too much of tomorrow today—to the point where we’ve run out of tomorrow: fiscally, our days are numbered; structurally, we’ve been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and geopolitically, the Medes are thin on the ground but the Persians have gone nuclear.

  MENE MENE . . .

  So, if the deficits are “unsustainable,” then what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded

  Testifying to the House Budget Committee in 2010, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he told the political grandees. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”20

  Dream on, you kinky fantasist. If that’s your deus ex machina, bet on Mad Max. As an example of the “action” being contemplated, Obama’s Debt Commission produced a report melodramatically titled “The Moment of Truth”—and then proposed such “actions” as raising the age of Social Security eligibility to sixty-nine.21

  By the year 2075.

  As that “solution” suggests, the real problem is that over the last three-quarters of a century the United States has adopted a form of government all but impervious to reality. Come alternate Novembers, the American people have a choice between a fellow running on fluffy abstract nouns—“hope,” “change,” “generic gaseous uplift”—and a f
ellow promising small government. That’s a best case scenario, by the way. Sometimes, as in 2008, you find yourself choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee the mortgages of people who “bought” houses they and their banks knew they couldn’t afford, and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes. But, assuming you did get a genuine choice, what is the net result of these two starkly different platforms?

  None. In America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) went from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion in 2008.22 Regardless.

  The Heritage Foundation put it in a handy cut-out’n’weep graph: until the Democrats accelerated up to Obamacrous Speed in 2009, it’s a near perfect straight line across four decades, up, up, up.23 Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House—Democrat, 24 Sometimes, as in 1980, 1994, and 2010, they explicitly vote for small government. And then, on the Wednesday morning after the Tuesday night before, Big Government resumes its inexorable growth. Newt Gingrich and his dragon-slayers? According to a 2000 report by the Cato Institute, “the “combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13 percent.”25

  That’s what’s happened since the Sixties. What of the future? The CBO ran the longer-term numbers: The “alternative fiscal scenario,” which factors in likely changes in policy, calculates that public debt will rise from 44 percent of GDP in 2008 to 716 percent by 2080.26 Then again, the CBO’s “extended-baseline scenario,” which assumes there will be no changes to current policy, says public debt will only rise to 280 percent by 2080.

  It doesn’t matter which of these figures is correct, and it was a complete waste of time running the numbers. The worst case is 716 percent? And the best is 280 percent? That’s a choice between dead and deader. Who cares? If either number is right, there isn’t going to be a 2080, not for America.