Mark Steyn's "New York Times" bestseller, "After America", is now in paperback!Featuring a new introduction and updated throughout, "After America" takes on Obama's disastrous plan for our nation, and reveals exactly what a post-American world will look like if we don't change our ways soon.Says Steyn: "Nothing is certain but debt and taxes. And then more debt. If the government of the United States had to use GAAP ("The Generally Accepted Accounting Practices" that your company and the publisher of this book have to use), Uncle Sam would be under an SEC investigation and his nephews and nieces would have taken away the keys and cut up his credit card". Slim as it is, however, Steyn argues there is still hope. "Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. This is a battle for the American idea, and it's an epic one, but you can do anything you want to do. So do it."Bitingly funny and wickedly clever, "After America" is Mark Steyn at his best.Praise for After America"Mark Steyn is a modern day Jeremiah with a quiverful of devastating one-liners, nailing what the liberals have done to our country. He presents an alarming—and frighteningly convincing—prophecy of where we're headed. The choice is stark—we either listen to Steyn and act on his recommendations or face economic and cultural armageddon."—Mark Levin"Mark Steyn has done it again. In his new book, After America, he clearly defines the dangerous signals which show America is embracing the same doomed path as the failed European economies, and how vital it is to implement and avoid policies right now to prevent us from the same fate."—Sean Hannity"Only Mark Steyn can write about the decline of America and leave you laughing."—Ann Coulter
The sun’ll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow there’ll be sun
Previously on
It was the worst of times, it was the not quite so worst of times.
The predecessor to this book was called
“C’mon, man. You told us last time it was the end of the world. Well, where the hell is it? I want my money back. Instead, you come breezing in with this season’s Armageddon-outta-here routine. It’s like Barbra Streisand fare-well tours—there’ll be another along next summer.”
Well, now:
The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule.
The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.
Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true.
From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check. But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program but supersized.
Heigh-ho.
It starts with the money. In “The Run Upon the Bankers” (1720), Jonathan Swift wrote:
A lot of writing on the wall these days. Who has the bonds of a “developed world” developed to the point that it’s institutionally conditioned to living beyond its means? Foreigners with money. So who’s available and flush enough? The Chinese Politburo; Saudi sheikhs lubricated with oil but with lavish worldwide ideological proselytizing to fund; Russian “businessmen.”… These are not the fellows one might choose to have one’s bonds, never mind one’s soul, but there aren’t a lot of other options.
So it starts with the money—dry stuff about numbers and percentage of GDP. As Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado fumed to a room of voters in 2010, “We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it.”1
He’s right—and $13 trillion is the lowest of lowball estimates. But why then did Senator Bennet vote for the “stimulus” and ObamaCare and all the other trillion-dollar binges his party blew through? Why did Senator Bennet string along and let the 111th Congress (2009–2011) run up more debt than the first one hundred Congresses (1789–1989) combined?2 Pan-icked by pre-election polls into repudiating everything he’d been doing for the previous two years, the senator left it mighty late to rediscover his virtue.
You would think that Colorado voters might have remembered that, like Groucho Marx apropos Doris Day, they knew Michael Bennet before he was a virgin. Alas, an indulgent electorate permitted the suddenly abstemi-ous spendaholic to squeak back into office.
And, contra Senator Bennet, eventually you
Let’s take a thought by the economist Herbert Stein: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.3
