Tapped Out Nation

It was to be the year of change, of new ideas, a new
politics.

Yet, as of today, it appears the Republican Party
will be

led into the future by a Beltway

favorite of the media and

Washington insider who has spent the last quarter of
a century on Capitol Hill.

And the Democratic Party appears about to build a
bridge to the past by

nominating the spouse of the

last Democratic president who has herself been a
Washington insider for almost 20 years.

With two-thirds of the nation saying the country is
on the wrong course, the two parties are offering
candidates both of whom played major roles in setting
that course. And neither probable nominee has advanced
ideas to deal with the crises America faces, nor even
shown any great awareness that the country is in crisis.

The first crisis is fiscal, with the

Social Security,

Medicare and

Medicaid costs about to break the bank as the baby
boomers reach early retirement. Add the other
entitlement programs, defense and interest on the debt,
and this consumes perhaps 90 percent of the budget.

No one is proposing cuts in any major component of
the budget. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton is promising universal
health care and McCain is promising an expansion of the
military. Both favor a stimulus package of roughly $150
billion. As our savings rate is about zero, where are we
going to borrow the money for all this?

A second crisis is financial. With the economy in
danger of seizing up, the Fed has cut interest rates
from 4.25 percent to 3 percent in two weeks. This has
sent the dollar plunging again. A sinking dollar means
surging prices for oil and all those

foreign manufactures to which we are now addicted.

As the dollars pour out, nations have started to
spend their dollar hoards to buy up this country at the
fire-sale prices being offered in the global
marketplace.

A third crisis is strategic. With an army of half a
million and a Marine Corps a third that size, we are
ending our fifth year of war in Iraq and entering the
seventh year in

Afghanistan. With the Taliban and al-Qaida now
re-established and threatening

Pakistan, what will it require in blood and treasure
to prevent a strategic disaster there?

Mrs. Clinton is committed to a withdrawal from Iraq,
but McCain says we will stay 100 years if necessary and
warns,

"There`s going to be other wars."
But wars against whom? Iran? Pakistan?
Russia? North Korea? With the U.S. military stretched to
the breaking point, and the quality of army recruits
falling, who will fight these wars?

Then there is the immigration crisis. It is

estimated that there are

12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the
United States today, with many hundreds of thousands
being added each year.

McCain and Hillary both voted for the amnesty bill,
neither is committed to sending back the illegals, and
both give only

grudging support to the idea of a border fence. How
do they propose stopping the

scores or hundreds of millions from Latin America,
Asia, Africa and the Middle East from breaking into the
United States in coming decades? Does anyone see in
either Clinton or McCain the resolve to deal with what
Americans are coming to believe is a crisis of national
identity and national survival?

Then there is the crisis of the American middle
class.

As economist Robert Reich writes, the real wages of
working men have not risen in 30 years. Families
maintained their standard of living three ways.

Wives went to work. The men began to work longer
hours than in almost any other developed nation. The
family`s equity in its home was then borrowed to sustain
consumption. [America`s
middle classes are no longer coping, By Robert
Reich, Financial Times, January 29 2008]

Now, with the middle class tapped out, the home
equity used up or declining, and mortgage, auto and
credit card debt turning rotten, the U.S. government is
going abroad to borrow 1 percent of GDP to hand out in
checks in May to get consumers buying again to prevent a
recession.

What kind of long-term solution is this?

How can a government as deep in debt as this one,
going deeper every day, with the Social
Security-Medicare crisis looming, continue to borrow to
fight wars, finance foreign aid and defend nations that
refuse to make the sacrifices to defend themselves?

America today faces both a fiscal crisis and a
currency crisis.

Our dependence on foreign loans, foreign oil and
foreign manufacturers is unprecedented.

We are being

invaded from the south and seemingly lack the moral
fiber to

defend our home and

throw out the intruders.

We have neither the men nor the weapons to honor all
the treaty commitments and war guarantees we have given
out to nations all over the world—and McCain plans to
add several more.

Yet, we are consumed with the issue of whether

Bill Clinton, by comparing Barack Obama to Jesse
Jackson, was playing

"the race card."

We are an unserious people in a serious time.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.