by Smitty
Insty links Mark Steyn’s latest lamentation:
But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent — or getting on for twice as much as the second-most-insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.
Insty concludes:
No organization can survive corruption and ineptitude at the top forever. And we’ve had the worse political class in American history for a while now, though its rottenness has really accelerated lately.
My contention is that if Barack Obama had not been located to #OccupyResoluteDesk, the plutocrats would have located another tool. The worm eating the heart out of everything is the Federal Reserve. If you haven’t diagnosed the problem, and told me what we’re going to do to halt the longest-running heist in human history, then, I submit, you’re merely re-arranging the tungsten on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Of course, returning to Insty’s point, the only GOP candidate discussing the Federal Reserve seriously is the one with the lowest likelihood of election. But is Paul talking about the Fed despite, or rather because of his relatively lower chance? The U.S. has to realize that crude propaganda plays like the Sandra Fluke farce or leveraging the Trayvon Martin tragedy are symptomatic of an utterly broken, dysfunctional President. If we are insufficiently exceptional to call ‘nonsense’ on #OccupyResoluteDesk, then we’re collectively justifying his idiocy.
