By Wes Pedersen
I like David Brooks, the New York Times analyst who agrees with me about the economic disaster facing the U.S. -- although he can be a bit tardy.
By 2020, writes Brooks, the U.S. will be paying one trillion dollars a year on the interest of the loans it has taken out. Somewhere between now and then, economic calamity like none other will strike without warning.
That's the future we face and no one is doing anything to prevent it.
Our political leaders are making strenuous noises of exertion in behalf of deficit reduction. They're not making any sense with their shout-outs and labored studies. Chopping economic structures to the ground is not a formula for dealing with a crisis of this sort. It is rather a method guaranteed to destroy not only the economic but political and social fabrics of our lives.
Does any politician really think Social Security and Medicare can be pared to the bone without causing a revolution by the voting elderly and their families? Raising the retirement age of Social Security annuitants might squeak by, but cutting the monthly stipends for those already receiving them would be mercilessly cruel. Can school budgets be cut with destroying the futures of the young, and the hopes of their parents and grandparents?
Obamacare can and will be trimmed in talks the President will have with the insistent Republicans.
This brings us to the two tremendously costly wars we are still fighting on different fields. Can we afford them? Of course not. They have, almost literally, bled us dry. Consider the facts: combat operations have ceased officially in Iraq, but we still have 50,000 nation-building troops stationed there as walking targets. In Afghanistan, the grafting puppet we thought we had firmly in place is telling us it's time for us to pare down operations and get out.
The Obama administration, foolhardy from Inauguration Day with Afghanistan, wants four more years to bring peace to the countryside. The military says talk of getting out hurts our role and morale on the battlefield. Republicans consider the Bush-launched wars sacrosanct.
We've been there for most of a decade. The British and Russians, indeed almost every "civilized" country or people in history, have tried in vain to tame the Afghans. But here we are, in a time of great financial need, talking about tripling our time and losses there, though neither country really wants us there now.
What greater excuse do we need to finally admit: We have done our best. We have done everything we could, and much, much more. But we can't afford these wars any more. And hanging on is pointless when we know that however long we might stay, the two countries will at some time in the future revert to some form of despotic rule.
There are many domestic areas in which making fiscal cuts will be wrenchingly difficult to do, but it is time for us, as it was in Vietnam, to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |