Well, no, not really.

Don't waste your time trying to analyze a folly, just ask what it accomplishes.

If you want to go bankrupt, what's the best way to do it? Reduce your income drastically and find ways to spend money as fast as you can. Go so far into debt that you can no longer afford to spend any money at all.

The Bush administration wants to bankrupt the treasury. Bush substantially reduced the nation's income with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy. The so-called "trickle down" theory has long since been discredited, but that was, and continues to be, the supposed rational for the tax cuts.

A good way for a nation to spend a lot of money is to start a war. Any war. Just find an excuse to declare war on someone, even if you have to manufacture a reason. You can spend a lot of the tax-payers' money on the war itself, then you can dump a lot of their money by contracting with private companies (especially companies owned by your friends) to repair the damage your war has caused (this is the neo-conservative version of "redistributing the wealth"). And then, if you're lucky, you have a couple of very expensive natural disasters (Jeez! Katrina was practically made to order—maybe Bush does have a direct pipeline to God!!), and anything else that will provide a way for you to blow great wads of money, and as our friends across the pond would say, "Bob's your uncle!"

Now, why would anybody want to do something like this? Okay, the tax policies of people like Grover Norquist dominate and set the whole tone of the Bush administration. He is perhaps most famous for his statement, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" What bothers neo-conservatives like Norquist and many others of similar persuasion is that they believe the government should not be involved in any way in regulating the affairs of business or in providing any kind of social programs.

They want free enterprise to be absolutely free—totally unrestricted by any kind of government regulation. Never mind that it was lack of any kind of regulation that led to a series of depressions, culminating in the Great Depression in the Thirties, and more recently, things like the Enron and World Com scandals. In these more recent scams (resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of pensions, etc.), the Securities and Exchange Commision (instituted in the Thirties by FDR) should have prevented this from happening, but they were looking the other way because the presidential appointees in the agency were a collection of incompetent cronies (fox in charge of the chicken coop). This also explains other incompetent cronies such as Brown in charge of FEMA. Bush and his minions don't believe the governemt should even be involved in things like emergency aid. They believe such things should be left to the "private sector." Think about that for awhile!

If they are successful, this will inevitably result in a form of neo-feudalism—big corporations in the role of the Lords of the Manor (or Castle), complete with company towns in which the workers (serfs) live, company stores and all that, right back to those glorious days of Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, et al. It is not for nothing that these people were referred to as "robber barons." A great nostalgia for the Age of Feudalism. Somehow, I don't think this is really appropriate for the twenty-first century, nevertheless. . . .

The neo-conservative's approach to social problems is a combination of the Calvinist doctrine (I'm not at all sure that, like Jesus, John Calvin would approve of many of the beliefs that are preached in his name) that God, in His omniscience, already knows who is going to be saved and who is going to Hell, and the way we mortals can tell which is which is that even in this life, God favors his chosen by making them prosperous and successful. The poor and downtrodden, already condemned, are, of course, getting only what they deserve because of their sinful ways (and because they "made the wrong choices"). This is reiforced on the secular level by Social Darwinism. This is the belief that says "It is immoral to provide aid to the poor. If they are allowed to simply die off, this will improve the species." This, of course, assumes that the poor are poor because they are genetically defective. Hitler's eugenics programs were based on this kind of belief.

The aim of Bush's economic policies is to deplete the U. S. treasury to the point where the government can no longer afford to fund the regulatory and social agencies and programs that the neo-conservatives want to see eliminated (all of them, including Social Security and Medicare). Bush has said within the past day or so that in order to have the funds to rebuild New Orleans, it will be necessary to cut social programs. Rescind the tax cuts for the wealthy? Absolutely not!

Now—

In the meantime, this may have some interesting side-effects that the neo-conservatives are apparently failing to take into consideration. First of all, the Bush administration is financing its massive deficit spending by borrowing money from various countries, particularly China. The result of this is that the American dollar, once the strongest currency in the world, is becoming weaker and weaker on the international market. Imported goods (and a huge percentage of products that bear American trademarks are actually made overseas—the Hewlett-Packard notebook computer I'm typing on right now was made in China (are there any computers, chips and all, made in the United States these days?). It is next to impossible to "Buy American" anymore.

China is no longer a "sleeping giant." It's very much awake and growing in economic and geopolitical power. One of the great horrors of the American multinational corporation complex and its political puppets is the possibility of Asian countries such as China, Japan, and the Koreas getting together and forming an economic union. And speaking of economic unions, read The United States of Europe : The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T. R. Reid. ". . . Europeans set out to create a lasting peace on the continent and a shared economy. They did not aim low. Their dream is to produce, once and for all, an end to war on the continent, and an end to poverty." Would that we had such a noble goal!

It was the goal of the Project for the New American Century—a neo-conservative think-tank—that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States maintain its new position, economically and militarily, as the world's sole superpower. They didn't anticipate anything like the potential geopolitical and economic power of the European Union. And I would be greatly surprised if, soon now, we don't see a United States of Asia, encompassing the aforementioned countries, plus, perhaps others such as Malaysia and India, with goals similar to those of the European Union.

Between short-sightedness, internal corruption, and external pressure, the Roman Empire, at one time the world's only superpower, crumbled. Considering that many of the same factors currently exist, it would not surprise me if the United States soon follows suit.

Don Firth

P. S. No, this is not cut-and-paste. I wrote all of this myself. Sorry it's so long, but I get a little worked up sometimes.