But now the US Government is paying the price for that glorious free-spending time of so long ago. Like a recreational drug user now turned hopeless addict, the government has taxed profitable businesses into seeking friendlier homes in other lands, and has turned to looting trust funds and playing bookkeeping games trying to hold off the final collapse...

The U.S. Government is Dying: No longer able to conceal the financial losses, the US Government, like a desperate addict, is turning to crime as a source of funds, crime on a global scale, conquest, war for profit, call it what you will, an invasion of a nation is different from an invasion of a home only in scale.

The US Government has been making bad decisions since at least the 80s. In hindsight, a government composed almost entirely of lawyers should not have been expected to know anything about how to run an economy based on manufacturing. As a result, legislation was passed that encourage manufacturing to leave this nation. The lawyer/politicians, rather than admit error, tried to conceal this loss by inventing the "service economy", a ridiculous notion that one can prosper a nation by doing each others' laundry for a fee. The service economy did not bring money into the nation, it merely moved what was left around faster, increasing opportunities for taxation. The effect of this was that cash flowed from the people to the government, good for government struggling with a crushing debt load, but bad for the people for the nation, 80% of whom suffered a steady decline of living standards throughout the 80s and 90s.

Minus the manufacture of actual products, investors flocked to more speculative ventures, many of which turned out to be gigantic stock manipulation swindles.

But rather than address the problems, the government started playing its own bookkeeping games, looting Social Security and claiming it was a budget surplus. Knowing that the stock market was in trouble, the "Plunge Protection Team" was created to use government sanctioned rigging to keep the numbers high, as a political banner, even though such activity made the underlying problem of over-valuation much, much worse.

The loss of manufacturing to other nations meant that Americans had to buy more and more products once made in the USA from companies in other nations. This created the present $1.5 billion a DAY trade deficit. Normally, such a trade imbalance would drive the value of the dollar down, but a devalued dollar makes that portion of the government debt held by foreign interests increase, since the debt is held in the currency of the lending institution.

This was the rock and hard place the US Government found itself in. So deep in debt it cannot even make the interest payments, unable to sell products to generate revenues to pay that debt because manufacturing was taxed into relocating, and a threatened collapse of the dollar that would force a default on the debt and ruin the standard of living Americans had worked so hard to achieve.

From that perspective, a war of conquest to grab oil and to force the conquered nations to use the dollar to keep demand for the dollar high looks like the best option for a bankrupted government.

But is it best for the people?

Let us say for a moment that we do go to war. Let us say we conquer several nations and force them to use the dollar. How does that change life here in the United States? We would still have a totalitarian government deeply in debt. To maintain its legitimacy, that government would still have to shackle you and your children to that debt. We still would not have a tax system conducive to creation of new manufacturing in this country. In other words, even winning the war would not improve our lives. All that would be accomplished after all the blood was shed and the money was spent was that the very same people who got us all into this mess would continue in power.

Let's try the other option. Let's say that the US Government, unable to initiate a war, or starting one but unable to carry it out, watches as the world switches to the Euro, and the over-valued and frankly worthless debt-stricken dollar collapses. The Federal Reserve collapses. The people will not tolerate another "bail out" especially of an institution which has been such a curse on the common man. As the banks and stock markets collapse, the US Government will get dragged down with the whole mess.

But the people will still be here. Those 288 million Americans and their skills, will still be here. And like our Founding Fathers they will simply form a new government, one that starts out free of the huge debts run up by 100 years of reckless spending by the old government, a government made up, not of lawyers, but of teachers, engineers, doctors, the people who KNOW how to make a civilization work. Yes, there will be a time of confusion, as was the case when the USSR collapsed. But as was demonstrated in the new Russia, following that confusion will be a time of opportunity for all the people with the strength and courage to take advantage of it.