pa4105c.jpg Paul Lachine

America’s Self-Inflicted Decline

America’s friends around the world watched with dismay the recent brawl in the US over raising the federal government’s debt ceiling, and the inability to come to anything like a balanced and forward-looking compromise. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that good government might be impossible in the US.

MELBOURNE – If the broad post-World War II prosperity that has endured for six decades comes to an end, both the United States and Europe will be responsible. With rare exceptions, politics has become a discredited profession throughout the West. Tomorrow is always treated as more important than next week, and next week prevails over next year, with no one seeking to secure the long-term future. Now the West is paying the price.

President Barack Obama’s instincts may be an exception here, but he is fighting powerful hidebound forces in the United States, as well as a demagogic populism, in the form of the Tea Party, that is far worse – and that might defeat him in 2012, seriously damaging America in the process.

America’s friends around the world watched with dismay the recent brawl in over raising the federal government’s debt ceiling, and the US Congress’s inability to come to anything like a balanced and forward-looking compromise. On the contrary, the outcome represents a significant victory for the Tea Party’s minions, whose purpose seems to be to reduce government obligations and expenditures to a bare minimum (some object even to having a central bank), and to maintain President George W. Bush’s outrageous tax breaks for the wealthy.

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