{"id":41010,"date":"2018-11-28T06:51:30","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T11:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41010"},"modified":"2018-11-28T06:51:30","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T11:51:30","slug":"the-coming-bankruptcy-of-the-american-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41010","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Bankruptcy of the American Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Coming Bankruptcy of the American Empire<\/a><\/h3>\n

Better to bring the troops home on our terms than wait for a debt crisis to do it for us.<\/p>\n

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Credit:\u00a0Anneka\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The chickens are coming home to roost. It\u2019s only a question of when.<\/p>\n

Herbert Stein was chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and is the father of the more well known Ben Stein. In 1976, he propounded what he called \u201cStein\u2019s Law\u201d: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Stein was referring to economic trends, but the same law applies just as much to foreign policy and the concept of empire.<\/p>\n

Stein\u2019s Law at first glance might seem like a banal platitude. But we should be fully cognizant of its implications: an unsustainable system must have an end. The American empire is internally flawed, a fact that anti-imperialists both left and right should appreciate.<\/p>\n

The United States\u2019 national debt is approaching $22 trillion with a current federal budget deficit of over $800 billion. As Senator Rand Paul often points out, bankruptcy is the Sword of Damocles hanging perilously close to Uncle Sam\u2019s neck. Outside of a handful of libertarian gadflies in Congress such as Paul, there is no serious political movement to curb the country\u2019s wayward spending. It would take some upset of multiple times greater magnitude than Donald Trump\u2019s 2016 victory to alter this course.<\/p>\n

The United States holds the most debt of any country in the history of the world. In fairness, when our debt-to-GDP ratio is factored in, there are many countries in far more perilous economic situations than the U.S. But there will come a tipping point. How much debt can the system hold?<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Coming Bankruptcy of the American Empire Better to bring the troops home on our terms than wait for a debt crisis to do it for us. Credit:\u00a0Anneka\/Shutterstock The chickens are coming home to roost. It\u2019s only a question of when. Herbert Stein was chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents Richard Nixon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3602,1361,195,4106,259,23243,16732,827],"class_list":["post-41010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-american-empire","tag-bankruptcy","tag-debt","tag-debt-crisis","tag-empire","tag-hunter-derensis","tag-the-american-conservative","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41011,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010\/revisions\/41011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}