A World Of Financial Ruin

by Conrad Black - May 28th, 2011 - National Post Of Canada

The world’s reserve currency, the fabled vehicle of the “faith and credit of the United States,” is now virtual money — a symbol for all the other massive problems afflicting the U.S. economy. The imported share of America’s oil consumption, for instance, has gone from 20% to 60%. Large suppliers like Iran and Venezuela have become hostile countries. Yet Americans remain neurotic about paying half the gas price of other oil-importing countries.

The cost per capita of U.S. medical care is $7,000 compared to the average among Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, of $3,000; 70% of the people have immensely generous plans that they love with passionate attachment and don’t pay for, either as contributors or as taxable benefits, and the political class won’t touch this. [Emphasis added] Unfortunately, much of the other 30%, 100 million Americans, get what amounts to emergency health care only, and much of it is uninsured and is billed to the recipient until the patient is out of money, and only then provided gratis. Most of the largest states are bust; Social Security, student loans, Medicare (for the elderly in the U.S.) are all, also, in desperate need of an utterly cacophonous national conversation.

Unless the United States has the most spectacular cognitive awakening since Brunhilda, if not Lazarus, the laws of arithmetic are going to assert themselves in Zeus-like terms.

This article's honesty about the rest of the Western World, is equal to the above about the United States. We are hurtling towards a financial crisis that will dwarf the 2008 crisis. That one was mostly a crisis created by the panic of investors who were going to lose their fortunes and was rigged to get the average tax payer to bail out the rich who had bet wrong.

The next crisis is coming because government has continued to spend like there is no tomorrow, virtually assuring that there is no tomorrow.