After America полностью

That’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama had said on the subject only a few months before? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just four percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, ‘You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.’”¹⁰⁸

And by jiminy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand the president’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in his first year in office we made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans were driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, the Obama administration wasn’t terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. The Democrats immediately passed a bazillion dollar “stimulus” package to “stimulate” us back into our bad old ways, and, when that didn’t work, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve printed another gazillion dollars in “quantitative easing” to lure us back into the malls.

And how did the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They were aghast, and terrified—as you would be if you suddenly found yourself strapped into a nightmare ride on a one-way express elevator into the abyss.

They didn’t put it that way, of course. Economics correspondents instead penned erudite thumbsuckers about how the global economy needed to restore aggregate demand. Which is a fancy term for you—yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated, disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful thirst-quencher after you’ve been working up a sweat watching the 78” TV in your rec room with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: if you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the U.S.,” wrote Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.”¹⁰⁹ The European Union has 500 million people, compared with America’s 300 million.¹¹⁰ Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are advanced economies whose combined population adds up to that of the United States. Many EU members have enjoyed for decades the enlightened progressive policies that Americans didn’t find themselves on the receiving end of until the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era. Why then are these advanced societies so “inert” that their economic fortunes depend on the despised, moronic Yanks?

Well, that’s globalization. All the stuff that used to be made in America is now made somewhere else. But the people who buy it are still Americans.

That part hasn’t changed.

So, if Americans don’t make any of this stuff, where do they get the money to buy it?

By borrowing it. Once you’re paying what citizens of free societies do in taxes, what’s left barely covers room and board. So life’s little luxuries—

or cheap plastic Chinese-made luxuries—have to be paid for through debt.

So Americans buy toys that so enrich the Chinese they can afford to lend huge amounts of money to America to help our government grow even bigger so that Americans will have to borrow even more money for the next generation of cheap Chinese toys.

Hey, it’s globalization. What could go wrong?

Entire countries—not just the Third World assembly plants, but G7 members such as Canada—have economies overwhelmingly dependent on access to the U.S. market. “Globalization,” translated out of globaloney, means the American shopping mall is all but singlehandedly propping up living standards from Ontario to Indonesia. In 2010 U.S. consumer debt (that means us: not the spendaholic rulers but the spendaholic subjects) was about $2.5 trillion, or the combined GDP of Canada and India.¹¹¹ That seems like a lot of money to borrow in order to buy electronic amusements for a lifestyle we can’t afford.

But the Chinese are smart guys. They must know that, right?