Tornado Alley (PROG)

[SilverSurfer]

good post -

"So who's wrong? They both are, the right and the left. The political right is wrong for believing we can ignore our credit rating decline from not extending the debt ceiling and not suffer. Almost every financial analyst says otherwise. In other words, go ahead and declare personal bankruptcy for your own family and see if there are not repercussions.

The left is wrong for acting like extending the debt is dealing with the problem of debt.

It's simple. The system has simply grown too big, Murphy's Law if you want to believe in it, says that anything that can go wrong, sooner or later will go wrong. Or another way to look at it is, nothing fails like success. America has had a run of luck. We came out of World War II unscathed like the other countries, the richest most powerful country in the history of the world, with the highest standard of living in the world.

Millions of immigrants would want to venture here and share in these riches. There's nothing wrong with that. But it would work only as long as there were plentiful unskilled factory jobs for arriving immigrants. That has changed. China, a country that has T-Bill investments in the U.S., that helps prop us up, now has the factories that make our goods. Americans companies shipped jobs over there to take advantage of cheap labor.

The unskilled job that aAmerica has simply gotten too big.
llowed the immigrant to achieve middle class status here in the U.S. has gone. But immigrants keep arriving. This is what happened to Ancient Rome. It was flooded with immigrants wanting to share its wealth and whom could not be provided for, so the emperor gave them free bread and circuses.

The middle class in the U.S. is disappearing, and because of this, the rate of people paying into the system as opposed to those receiving benefits is declining. The approach of millions of baby boomers to old age is putting an incredible strain on an already-overburdened system.

Like Rome, the U.S. became the policeman of the world and maintained a large army all over the world. But the U.S. pursued two, not one, two wars at the same time, forgetting Abraham Lincoln's sage advice against going to war with England over a naval incident during the Civil War by cautioning, "one war at a time."

The madness of allowing government officials to mount two open-ended conflicts over ten years or longer without either a decisive military victory or a political settlement at a cost in trillions of dollars not to mention lives lost, and to add millions more to the rolls of newly returning veterans deserving of benefits staggers the mind.

Both Rome and the Soviet Union did not have a Constitution as does the U.S. Both Rome and the Soviet Union were rotten from the top down.

But a Constitution is only as responsive as the people who try to live up to it. It can be undermined by profligate extravagance, attempting to do too much, spending billions on unending wars, billions on space exploration, billions on personal benefits either promised like Social Security, or through entitlements.

Billions here, billions there. It adds up.

It's become too big. And to think, in 1937, the U.S. had a military smaller than that of Bulgaria.

Here are some other similarities. The Soviet Union fought a war in Afghanistan just before its collapse and could not provide adequate food and essential (store) goods for its citizens. In the U.S., the cost of food, gas, housing and even a college education are spiraling out of the affordable reach of an increasing number of citizens. In Ancient Rome, rival factions in the government or rival armies spent all their time fighting against each other rather than working together, much like today's widening ideological schism between the political left and right.

I could go on with more comparisons, but it's too depressing. My hope is that these are mere coincidences." http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/11177.html