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In its attempt to glorify “the 10 who shaped the U.S. economy the most since 2000,” ABC News did a great favor for those interested in the interconnections among the “elite” who are impacting the current world economic and political scene.
Naturally, much was left unsaid about these “captains,” especially regarding their connections to the elite currently in charge. In order, then, here is a brief look at each of these “10 who shaped the U. S. economy”:
If Will Rogers didn’t say “Those who don’t read the papers are uninformed; those who do are misinformed,” he probably should have.
Witness this headline from The Wall Street Journal: “Jobs, Spending Bode Well for Growth.”
Compared to this from Bloomberg: “Orders for Durable Goods in U. S. Unexpectedly Fall.”
Or this from APNews: “Jobless claims off, spending up in sign of rebound.”
Finally, to confound the confusion, see this from the Denver Post: “Good news raises hopes that recovery won’t fizzle.”
How does one make any sense of it all? Dr. Kenneth McFarland (named America’s Number One Public Speaker by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in 1965) once quipped that he had read so much about the harmful effects of tobacco and alcohol that he just decided to give up reading!
There is another option: dig deeper.
When Bob Schieffer of NBC News asked the rhetorical question: “…has going a trillion dollars in hock to one country [China] made us more secure?”, he was reminded of Everett Dirksen (Illinois Senator for nearly 20 years) and his famous comment: “…a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money!”.
The current account deficit, at the present moment, is over $12 trillion and climbing. About half of that debt is owned by foreign countries, most notably China (about $800 billion) and India (about $300 billion), with the balance owned by Japan, Germany, and others.
So what’s the big deal?
Image by gorbould via Flickr
We dont have to hire historians to see where deficit spending will take us. We have only to look around now. Since the end of World War II, some of history’s greatest national disasters have taken place right here in the Americas. North Americans used to laugh or shake their heads at the economies of the south that seemed always on the brink of collapse. Banana republics, we derisively called them. We’re not laughing now.
Here are some examples he provides of inflation lag time:
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