Quote of the Day: "The second half of the double dip yawns before us like the Grand Canyon"

Image by wallyg via Flickr

 The USA is in trouble. As Conrad Black writes in the National Post:

The United States is blundering through its fourth consecutive failed presidency, and the economic apocalypse that is about to occur may be the only way, since decades of less soul-shaking opportunities have been squandered, of restoring America and its headship of state, to the practical and moral strength of former times.

America’s problems are not imperial overreach, or social decay, which have brought down the world’s previous leading nations and peoples; they are profound but corrigible public-policy errors. The nation was transformed into a white-collar fool’s paradise, where lawyers bill $1-trillion a year, manufacturing departs and too few people are actually doing anything useful. The result: no saving, little investment and instant gratification on borrowed money.  

The United States now is in a shockingly deteriorated condition. It is debt-ridden, hobbled by grievous failings in honesty of government, integrity of the justice system, competitiveness of the education system, anomalies in immigration policy, insupportable health-care costs, a presidency that has almost no credibility, a foreign policy that has foundered on the appeasement of Iran (as well as absurd nostrums such as the pursuit of a non-nuclear world and the war on global warming) and an economic policy that has been an epochal failure. The second half of the double dip yawns before us like the Grand Canyon, and it will be deeper and longer than the first, until leadership provides the radical solutions that are required.

-- Conrad Black, National Post.

The "radical leadership" that is needed is to get the US debt under control, and under management. But, in a culture that eschews deferred gratification (the foundation of all successful societies and lives)  is there a moral, social, or political will to do so?

 "Instant gratification on borrowed money" is not a Christian value or virtue.  John Wesley preached, "earn as much as you can, save as much as you can, give as much as you can." That's still good advice for Christians, and for society at large. A society that takes as much as it can, saves as little as it can, and borrows as much as it can is built on sand.

Right now, the US is in sinking-sand debt up to its nose.

May God save the USA, because, if it falls, we all go down with it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Instant pleasure or delayed gratification? (telegraph.co.uk)