America

Last week, when looking at the divergence between Donald Trump's proposed fiscal plan to "make America great again" on the back of an unprecedented fiscal stimulus boost which is expected to add $5.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade...

... and the deleveraging fiscal plan espoused by House Republicans...

... we pointed out something disturbing: the two plans were roughly $12 trillion apart over a cumulative ten year period, a difference equal to more than one-quarter of total federal outlays.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Speaking in Greece on his valedictory trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama struck a familiar theme:

“(W)e are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude form of nationalism, or ethnic identity, or tribalism that is built around an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ …

 

“(T)he future of humanity and the future of the world is going to be defined by what we have in common, as opposed to those things that separate us and ultimately lead us into conflict.”

Submitted by Charles Hugh-SMith via OfTwoMinds blog,

In this war of the rising and fading elites, there is no common ground or incentive to compromise.

Historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling elite as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Robert Kagan avoids the obvious in his description of the presidential campaign:

Internationalists such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio went nowhere this year; Bernie Sanders joined Mr Trump in attacking global involvement; and Hillary Clinton was hit from all sides for being too internationalist and too wedded to the idea of the US as the “indispensable nation”, the Bill Clinton phrase that encapsulated the thinking of every president from Harry Truman to George W Bush.

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