[lbo-talk] Niall Ferguson bewails US imperial decline

[Charles Brown]

Doesn't the U.S. have this deficit thing taken care of with other countries
( China and others) left holding the bag, so to speak, can't cash in their
U.S. treasury notes, or whatever.It's imperalism 2006 : U.S. plays
"debtor-deadbeat" nation to China left holding the bag of "Confederate"
treasury notes , tee hee. Instead of exporting capital, the new imperialism
is import capital , and set it up such that your creditors can't collect
their loans from you. (See Michael Hudson's _Super-Imperialism_). 

Charles

^^^^^

Max B.  qutoed:*	

	"The second constraint on America's unstated empire is the U.S.
budget deficit. The costs of the war in Iraq are proving significantly
higher than the administration forecast: $290 billion since the invasion in
2003. That figure is not much in relation to the size of the U.S.
economy-less than 2.5
percent of gross domestic product-but it has clearly proved insufficient to
achieve the swift postwar reconstruction that might have averted today's
incipient civil war. Other spending priorities, such as the ballooning
unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system, have precluded the Marshall 

	Plan for the Middle East that some Iraqis had hoped for."