Can America’s greatness be sustained in the absence of national solvency?, so asks Judy Shelton, Atlas’s Sound Money Project Senior Fellow, in today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, “The United States: Debtor and Leader?.” Concerned that our fiscal irresponsibility is making us vulnerable on the world stage, she raises an alarm about America’s potential decline as a global leader, the kind that involves nothing less than having to compromise our principles “to avoid offending our financial benefactors.”
As an example, she cites China — to whom America is heavily indebted — and how it uses its financial advantage as a leverage towards exploiting any issue it wants, including pressuring President Obama not to extend support for the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s campaign for autonomy. Shelton is worried, and rightly so, that all this will lead to a “longer-term vulnerability to financial extortion,” “to the perception, at home and abroad, that American values may be subjugated to financial considerations due to America’s permanent state of indebtedness.”
Her policy recommendations?
“We need to radically cut spending, take dramatic steps to increase growth, and quit monetizing budget shortfalls as if they didn’t matter. We need sound money and sound finances; it’s time to start paying back the federal debt, some 46% of which its owed to foreigners.”
As America is occupied prosecuting two wars abroad, this one, right here, is staring glaringly at us.
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