Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

No doubt you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement with the analysis here, regarding the growing economic crisis in the United States. The depth of it hasn’t sunk in for many Americans, and Ron Paul is going to look like a frigging genius in only a few years time (to those who remember him by that point, anyway).

It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities.

[...]
By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used.

The important questions to ask are:
1. Did the USA survive being attacked because they possessed tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, and methods to deliver them within hours?
2. If the USA could have survived with only 500 nuclear bombs, what would the money, that went into making the other 32,000, have gone into instead?

And now we should ask, what in tarnation do we do with thousands of dangerous bombs that we are terrified of, and will be royally fubarred if only one gets out into the wrong terrorist hands?

“The fact that we did not modernise or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated.”

Hey, labour-buddy Buzz Hargrove, why don’t you tell GM, Ford, and Chrysler to modernize their capital assets, and introduce inter-changeable parts (like the industrial revolution intended!)? It’s pretty hard to blame the military for keeping your business model in the 20th century. Oh, hang on a second, who makes the Military’s Humvee?

Our [American] short tenure as the world’s lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: “Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone” (8).

–
Hat tip to Larry Hubich

–
UPDATE: Countdown to a Meltdown of the American dream