The US government is shut down, and the world economy is threatened if the US Congress does not raise the Debt Ceiling. Republicans and Democrats are at a stalemate and refuse to cooperate with each other. What to do?
Sometimes the way out of an impasse is for both sides to come together and blame a third party. A German Economist has found the perfect scapegoat: Germany.
Eonomist Uwe Bolt, writing in The Globalist, explains how Germany forced Congress to create the debt ceiling back in 1917. President Woodrow Wilson wanted to keep America out of the war raging in Europe, but German naval intransigence forced him to declare war:
However, the German navy, with its submarines, managed to cut Britain
off from supplies. This effective blockade led to the sinking of two
U.S. steamers off the British coast in February 1917. President Wilson
broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and, after receiving
Congressional authorization, declared war on the Kaiser on April 6,
1917.
Wars cost money. And Congress, recognizing that the president would need to borrow money, Congress enacted the Debt Ceiling:
So that the President would not have to return each time to beg for
more, why not do the patriotic thing and give him the ability to borrow a
fair number of times? So that things would not get out of hand, the
proposal to set a debt ceiling was enacted. And so, with the approval of the Second Liberty Bond Act in October
1917, a patriotic-minded U.S. Congress loosened the nation’s debt
issuance purse strings and basically created what we refer to today as
the debt ceiling.
But that wasn't the end of Germany's wholesale destruction of the American economic system. Decades later, again, thanks to Germany, Congress eliminated the Gold Standard:
But Germany’s guilt for the U.S. predicament of today does not end
there. The Second Liberty Bond Act also contained the so-called gold
clause. Its effect was that these war bonds had to be redeemed in gold.
And yet, U.S. gold reserves were far too small to make good on that
promise.Thus, some decades later,
the U.S. Congress upon the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
revoked the clause in 1933 retroactively. Coincidentally, many
(including four of nine Supreme Court Justices in 1935) consider that
action as the first U.S. debt default. Again, thanks to the Germans!
Germans like to blame America for everything from potato beetles to the earthquake in Haiti. So it's only fair that Germany get the blame for some of our own misery.
6 comments
Sorry we made your country addicted to war economics.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said that if the Axis Powers win, then “we would have to convert ourselves permanently into a militaristic power on the basis of war economy.” Finally, the Axis Powers had been defeated, but then came the nuclear arms race, the cold war, the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The questions are, theoretically, could the US ever have afforded diplomatic solutions of these conflicts? Would a financial collaps have been inevitable if the US returned to peace production? Of course, there always have been some wind fall profits derived from ‘unproductive war production’, but have they been worth the investment unless you don’t accept peace as a value for itsself? What could be the methadone program if the US ever decided to softly stop war economics? Colonizing Mars?
@koogleschreiber,
At least (postwar) Germany has been a major beneficiary of the American “war economics.”
I believe Germany would still be a divided country today if the American war economy had not performed better than that of the Soviet Union.
we should just let Germany take over the world. that we the USA can be a peaceful neutral nation like switzerland that takes in refugees and can invest in social programs like universal healthcare, while Germany builds up military might and leads the world, bombs Serbia, or whatever else they get up to.
@koogleschreiber, if we colonised Mars, it would become a sort of inbred backwater in outer-space like Alabama or Australia with right conservative politics and probably some sort of strange techno-agrarian culture. Ever read Red Star by Bogdanov? Probably it would not be so utopian on the red planet! 🙂
After many years on Mars, the degenerates would start to see themselves as the bold colonisers. Any new comers would be scorned, and anti-immigration groups would emerge, saying there were enough people on Mars already.
I think I already live on Mars.