Thoughts on the Financial Crisis

I guess by now everyone has seen the price tag attached to the planned financial Bailout plan. Which, added to the 500 Billion dollars we've spent on the Iraq War, is going to add up to over a 1 trillion dollars increase in the national debt.

It's difficult to know how worried to be about this. The media is proclaiming gloom and doom, but then the media is always telling us the world is coming to an end. I don't know about you, but in the past few years with Y2K, terrorist attacks, anthrax, Sars, Bird Flu, et cetera, I've been scared into thinking it's the end of civilization several times, and I'm beginning to get a bit numb to the chicken littles.

On the other hand, I've been reading editorials by economists for years which have been worried about the enormous government debt, and the disastrous effect it would have on the economy. This extra trillion dollars is not going to help things at all.

I remember a lecture I went to in Japan once, where an older gentleman was talking about his many years in Japan. "I love Japan," he said. "The only time I didn't really like was in the 1980s, because then the Japanese people were really arrogant. They thought, like so many other people have thought at one time or another, that America was left on the dustbin of history, and that the future belonged to them, and they were very arrogant about it at the time." He paused, and then added, "They're not so arrogant anymore."

I always kept that quote in mind over the years I was in Japan. Anytime there was a minor disaster, or anytime there was the slightest blip in the economy, a Japanese person would often hint to me that it was the beginning of the end for US dominance of the world. And I always told them not to get excited yet, and that the US had a lot of good years left. Being a history major, I knew we wouldn't last forever. But I figured we probably had about another 150 years.

Now though, with this financial crisis, and the huge debt, and the energy crisis, and peak oil, and global warming, and having our army bogged down in two separate (expensive) wars, the history major inside of me is starting to think that historically, empires have been brought down by a lot less.

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