Dan wrote: Me: First, let me assure anyone reading this that I in no way advocate war as a solution for anything, I'm just discussing the possible consequences of the State's current situation.
> Sure, if they invaded Europe in '79 and Carter wasn't willing to start > Armageddon. But, the military was a drain on their GDP, rising to 45% of it > at the end. Look at the war surrogate, the race to the moon. They weren't > close. I think they grew faster than the US for about 5 years. Planned > economies are OK for a while, but tend to get caught up in artificial goals. > China has been the exception, but that's because we are in an era of no real > disruptive innovations....and China doesn't have to adapt. Why Japan is in > a funk now is interesting....socially they couldn't make the obvious > decisions. The point is that after the war they had a large empire and access to abundant resources. Their subsequent mismanagement of those resources does not negate the fact that they had the potential to prosper as a result of the war. > We'd probably repudiate it. But, there's a much easier way to handle it. > Get the deficit (not national debt) down, and put inflation up at 15%/year. > After a decade, we'd owe them zilch. That's one very unique thing about the > US debt. We owe dollars. We can, by one statement of the Fed, get rid of > the debt. It wouldn't matter if interest rates went up, fixed debt in > inflationary times is good for the borrower, not the lender. Do you really think that China would just let that happen? > But, if it got to the point of not paying the debt due to conflict, it would > probably get to WWIII. China's nukes aren't that good, so we'd probably > only lose LA, NY, Chicago, Houston, Washington, areas. I'd guess we'd get > by with less than 50 million killed. I can imagine a scenario in which the likelihood that any of China's nukes hit us is very low, but it would involve a preemptive strike of some sort, defensive nukes, and a way of keeping other powers such as Russia out of it. Considering our power and ability to deliver it to their doorstep, China has much more to fear from a nuclear conflict than we do, but considering the rate at which they are catching up to us, this could change. There are other scenarios that lead to war as well. The people running the PRK are lunatics and they have nukes, though I wouldn't be surprised if they blow themselves up before they blow anyone else up. Then there is the Middle Eastern bag of worms especially when Iran joins the N club. > But, I'd also guess that would set back the economy a good bit. At some point, it's set back so far already that it doesn't matter > > In general war is profitable to the victor if: > > 1) The homeland isn't hit. > 2) They can make money off the conquered. Well, trillions of dollars of debt disappearing overnight might be one source of gain. The fact that we'd have to ramp up our manufacturing capability again would be another. Another thing is that the current atmosphere of internal divisiveness would be ameliorated. Again I make these arguments as devil's advocate; please don't infer that I favor war as any kind of solution for our problems. I do imagine that there _are_ people that would make these kinds of arguments seriously. Doug _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
