IMPERIAL WARS FUEL THE NATIONAL DEBT
By Manuel E. Yepe

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.+

“The U.S. government has stolen $15,876,457,645,132.66 from future generations of Americans, and we continue to add well over a hundred million dollars to that total every single day. The 15 trillion dollar binge that we have been on over the past 30 years has fueled the greatest standard of living the world has ever seen, but this wonderful prosperity that we have been enjoying has been a lie. It isn’t real. We have been living way above our means for so long that we do not have any idea of what “normal” actually is anymore.”

Such is the argument presented by social activist, speaker and essayist Michael Snyder who discusses the present US national debt in a very well-documented article originally published in the blog The Economic Collapse and later reproduced by alternative media in several countries.

According to Snyder, every debt addict eventually hits “the wall”, and the same thing is going to happen to the American economy sooner or later.  In his words, “at some point the weight of our national debt is going to cause our financial system to implode, and every American will feel the pain of that collapse. Under our current system, there is no mathematical way that this debt can ever be paid back… We have piled up the biggest debt in the history of the world, and if there are future generations of Americans they will look back and curse us for what we did to them.”

In his essay 27 Things That Every American Should Know about the National Debt, Michael Snyder explains that “It took more than 200 years for the U.S. national debt to reach 1 trillion dollars. In 1986, the U.S. national debt reached 2 trillion dollars. In 1992, the U.S. national debt reached 4 trillion dollars. In 2005, the U.S. national debt doubled again and reached 8 trillion dollars. Now the U.S. national debt is about to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark.” Then the author asks, “How long can this kind of exponential growth go on?

According to American economists Joseph E. Stiglitz  --Nobel Prize Winner in Economics-- and  Harvard University Professor Linda J. Bilmes-- the Iraq invasion cost American taxpayers 3 thousand million dollars  and the war in Afghanistan a similar amount. This indicates that these war adventures doubled the public debt of the USA.

The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain. It represents more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world. It is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president and it will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015. A recently revised IMF policy paper projects that the U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the year 2050. Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

This is why there is no money for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, environmental care or the social security network.

But Washington does not lose sleep over this situation. Evidence of it is their financing and organization of conflicts aimed at overthrowing the national governments in Libya and Syria; their systematic intervention in the internal affairs of all the countries that do not yield their sovereignty to their imperial hegemony; and their continuous actions against international law in Pakistan and Yemen. 

Add to these the huge expenditure budgets for their dangerous actions, warfare preparations and threats (covert and overt) deploying their naval forces as well as other efforts to surround Russia, China and Iran with military bases or the like – aimed at establishing a siege around these nations in the short or midterm.

And if things are bad in the US economy, they are not much better in the matters of war. Michael Snyder discusses the US reputation on its warfare performance and states: “A government whose military with the help of Great Britain were unable to occupy Iraq eight years after they invaded it; who was forced to end the conflict by putting the “insurgents” on US military payrolls paying them so they would stop killing American soldiers; a government whose military have been unable in eleven years to contain a few thousand Taliban is overestimating its possibilities as it organizes a war against Iran, Russia and China.” 

August 2012.