Finance

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It’s been a little more than a year since I launched the present series of posts on the end of America’s global empire and the future of democracy in the wake of this nation’s imperial age. Over the next few posts I plan on wrapping that theme up and moving on.  However traumatic the decline and fall of the American empire turns out to be, after all, it’s just one part of the broader trajectory that this blog seeks to explore, and other parts of that trajectory deserve discussion as well.

When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings—“There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of  Shakespeare,” he wrote; “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin”—all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book ...

The upcoming "sequestration" this Friday originated in the Budget Control Act of 2011.  Since Congress can't agree on anything, they passed a bill for automatic budget cuts starting this Friday of $85 billion this year.  Cutting the bloated Empire's budget is a good thing if you ask me.  Starve the beast.  But of course Democrats and Militarists are crying wolf about the devastating results of budget cuts, especially the militarists.

Writers such as William Bennett are calling the military budget cuts...