On the military side of things, the United States is unquestionably the world's pre-eminent power and will retain that position for the foreseeable future. However, as someone once said, when economics gets important enough, it becomes political.
And, over the longer term, I have never seen a time-and I've been around for a long time-in which this many daunting, long-term economic challenges-very large elephants, if you will, that one could characterize as romping in our economic boudoir-that we pretend not to see and hope others are not rude enough to mention.
It seems to me quite obvious that these daunting, long-term challenges are undeniable, unsustainable but, in the current political context, untouchable. Unlike times past in American history, we want it all. We want it now. And, we don't seem to want to give up or pay for anything. Shared sacrifice is considered politically incorrect, if not terminal.
I give you four examples: First, the entitlement explosion. Given an aggravated sense of societal "short-termitis", these fiscal cancers, which will soon metastasize at an extraordinary rate, are, as I said, denied. We are anesthetized to this coming explosion by soporific-like, fictional "trust funds" that will allegedly keep Social Security and Medicare "solvent" for years.
Contrary to the trust-fund oxymoron, these trust funds should not be trusted and are not funded. Indeed, the unfunded liabilities, in today's dollars, have been variously estimated at about $40 trillion, or three times the GDP of the entire country.
