On the other hand, U.S. mortgage debt has more than quadrupled since 1990, from $2.5 trillion to over $10 trillion. On the other other hand — you may be running out of fingers by now — the IMF has increased its calculation of potential losses on U.S.-originated credit assets from $1.4 trillion last October to $2.2 trillion today, and that’s at the lowball end of estimates (others figure closer to $4 trillion). If you stick the community-organizer-in-chief in a room with Henrietta Hughes, he can play Bob Barker and tell her to “come on down!” But it’s not obvious that that technique will be quite so effective back in the Oval Office, poring over the smoldering ledgers.
2008: We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.
2009: We’re not so rich so let’s be even more stupid.
The Obama narrative as packaged by the American media (another all-but-bankrupt industry, not coincidentally) is very appealing. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if a benign paternalist sovereign could take care of all the beastly grown-up stuff like mortgages and health care, like he’s gonna do for Henrietta Hughes, while simultaneously blowing gazillions on “green” initiatives and other touchyfeely things?
America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .
Let’s not go there.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn< Back 1 2 
