After America: Get Ready for Armageddon

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE - THE NEW ROME

CRESCENT MOON

GOTTERDAMMERUNG

THE HOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

CHAPTER TWO - UNDREAMING AMERICA

THE STATIST QUO

TWO SOLITUDES

FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS MONEY

THE BUREAU OF COMPLIANCE

AS UNAMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

BULLS IN A CHINA SHOP

SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

CHAPTER THREE - THE NEW ATHENS

THE GREEK BONE CONNECTED TO THE KRAUT BONE

THE KRAUT BONE CONNECTED TO THE YANK BONE

THE YANK BONE CONNECTED TO . . . ?

CHAPTER FOUR - DECLINE

THE UTOPIA OF MYOPIA

CELEBRATE YOURSELF

THE STUDENT PRINCES

THE FEELIES

WE ARE THE WORLD . . .

. . . WE ARE THE CHILDREN

BOY MEETS GIRL

NO MAN’S LAND

CHAPTER FIVE - THE NEW BRITANNIA

AFTER THE BALL

WORLD WITHOUT WANT

THE LOTTERY OF LIFE

CHAPTER SIX - FALL

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

SEE THE U.S.A. IN YOUR CHEVROLET

BIG LOVE

DEPENDISTAN

THE KINGDOM OF THE BONOBO

SPLITSVILLE

BORDER COUNTRY

DESTINY’S MANIFEST

SHADOWLANDS

COUGAR TOWN

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE NEW JERUSALEM

THE NEW NORMALIUT

CHAPTER EIGHT - AFTER

IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY

FIVE BILLION GUYS NAMED MO

DARKNESS FALLS

AFTER MAN

THE SOMALIFICATION OF THE WORLD

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

NOTES

INDEX

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THE BRINK OF SUDDENLY

How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked.

Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.

—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

In an ever more competitive market for shrill apocalyptic doom-mongering, an author always hopes for some topical news peg to give his own contribution to the genre a bit of a lift. The book you’re about to read was first released in August 2011 and, just as all the sensible, prudent, moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor’s went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the very first time in history. Obligingly enough, they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be (minus the plus) the initials of the book: After America. You can’t buy publicity like that. Well, okay, you can, if you’ve got 16 trillion dollars and toss it in the Potomac and watch it float out to sea, as the government of the United States has done. But other than that, the stars have to align pretty darn precisely.

A few days after the U.S. release, the book debuted in the United Kingdom. If you skim the contents page, you’ll notice there’s a chapter about civic disintegration called The New Britannia: The Depraved City. So forty-eight hours before the British launch, a baying mob of feral welfare deadbeats decided to re-enact chapter five on the streets of London by burning half the city to the ground. Again, you can’t buy publicity like that. It was like Chapter Five: The Musical, if you’ve ever been to a musical where the cast torch the set, lob concrete at the ushers, and urinate into the orchestra pit. Switching on the TV to find a beautifully posed image of one of those double-decker buses beloved by tourists vividly ablaze and as perfectly lit as the iconic shot in a disaster movie (the aliens zapping the White House in Independence Day, say), I wondered briefly if Regnery’s publicity department had perhaps let the book tie-ins get a little out of hand. You probably want to be out of town when they decide the big nuclear finale could use a bit of a plug for the paperback.

The American downgrade and the British riots exemplify the two main themes of this book. Indeed, they’re the same theme: the blazing double-decker is where the plot goes after the financial pages—because ultimately Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances, but its human capital, too. There are a lot of people who dimly discern all this as a long-term threat a generation or two hence: Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, Well, fortunately I won’t live to see it. And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the ObamaCare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century and start thinking about mid-decade.

Alas, the thing about going bankrupt gradually is you kinda get used to it. As beneficial to my book launch as the American downgrade and the British riots were, one couldn’t honestly say they shook either country’s governing class out of its torpor and complacency—or focused anybody’s attention on mid-decade. It was remarkable how quickly America’s establishment adjusted to the downgrade. Making the rounds on the talk shows, I was discombobulated by the level of denial even on the right. These ratings are ridiculous, a respected conservative commentator scoffed. They should have a quadruple-A category just for us. Most of those triple-A nations aren’t even real countries, another suggested. The non-real countries include Canada and the Netherlands—oh, and also Australia, the only developed nation not to go into recession after the 2008 nosedive.

As to the downgraded citizenry—those London mobs marinated in government stimulus their entire lives—that couldn’t happen here, could it? Sturdy, self-reliant Americans aren’t the same as those deadbeat Brits and Europeans, are they? On page 206 of this book, I write of the UK’s generous welfare benefits:

The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as disabled. A fit, able-bodied 40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.

The Blairite lie has been eagerly embraced in America. In 1979, 7 percent of Americans received means-tested government benefits; by 2009, it was over 30 percent. In 2000, 17 million Americans were on food stamps; today, it’s 46 million. In the first three years of Obama’s hope ’n’ change, 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers ... but 3.1 million signed on for disability checks. They abandoned hope and changed their weekly trip to the careers center for one to the express check-in at the Social Security Disability office. In little more than a generation, dependency has metastasized in America. Workplace death and accident rates have fallen by 40 percent since the Sixties, but apparently the safer the American work environment gets, the more people are disabled by it.

In 2012, on the twenty-second anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Census Bureau proudly announced that just under one in five Americans were now disabled. In a mere two decades! If you build it, they will come! With that rate of increased capacity in incapacity, I’m confident that all Americans will be disabled by mid-century. Except for two or three schlubs working ’round the clock to pay for the rest.

To be disabled in the government sense, it is not necessary to be disabled in any meaningful sense. The Census Bureau lists such crippling disabilities as these: Had difficulty with schoolwork; Had difficulty finding a job or remaining employed. I don’t doubt it. Likewise, to be on food stamps, it is not necessary to be in need of food. In Massachusetts, as Governor Deval Patrick clarified, it’s fine to use them to buy porn and get tattoos. As the official U.S. Department of Agriculture slogan proudly proclaims: Food Stamps Make America Stronger. Indeed, they do. In Pierce County, Washington, customers of the Kamel Toe strip club have been picking up the check at the end of the night with the new food stamp debit card. In Colorado, it’s been used to pay for lap dances. Food stamps make the thigh muscles of America’s pole dancers and lap dancers stronger.

Whether or not most of those on disability are truly disabled, the U.S. economy certainly is. How many more millions will be on food stamps and disability by the end of the decade? In Ernest Hemingway terms, gradually is speeding up ...

IN THE YEAR 2526

You can’t fix a problem until you identify it honestly. Today, there are tens of millions of Americans who have absolutely no idea that we are broke—broker than any society has ever been. Granted, America is not alone in its appetites; the G7 is essentially a group of addicts run by pathological liars. If it were more honest, our guy would be standing up at the next meeting and saying, My name is Uncle Sam, and I’m a spendaholic. Instead, ramping up debt and dependency non-stop for four years, President Obama barely mentioned the subject of America’s looming insolvency—and so half the country thinks, yes, the jobs market is flatlined and the property market’s underwater, but it’s nothing that one more jobs bill, one more stimulus, one more Federal Department of Federal Bureaucratic Coordination for Coordinating Federal Bureaucracies can’t fix.

As for the energies of idealistic youth, the Occupy Wall Street movement brought us an army of slacktivists demanding the government reimburse them for their half-decade of sleeping in for Whatever Studies at Complacency U—and they were taken seriously for doing so. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the Transgender and Colonialism class. But the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement offer only a ludicrous paradox: They’re anarchists for Big Government. And, for all their protestations of solidarity with the oppressed of the Third World, they share the same assumptions of permanence as their parents and grandparents—that the U.S. will always be rich enough to indulge them.

In chapter one of this book, I have a bit of sport with our preference for raising awareness of diseases rather than, as we did in the old days, curing them. Yet, for all the hooting and jeering, the phony-baloney awareness-raising never stops. In 2011, the governor of Connecticut officially proclaimed Diaper Need Awareness Day. If you’re wondering what sentient being isn’t aware of diapers, you’re missing the point: Connecticut wants the federal government to hand out free diapers. (You can probably guess what color the awareness-raising ribbon for that is.) In Washington, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro introduced the DIAPER Act—which stands for the Diaper Investment and Aid to Promote Economic Recovery Act. Seriously. She wants to stimulate the economy by handing out free diapers. Diaper change you can believe in! We need to borrow another trillion from the Chinese politburo and stick it in your kid’s Pampers, just like we stuck it in Solyndra, and Fannie and Freddie, and all the rest.

Why is this stuff still taken seriously? Even in an ever more infantile nanny state, there’s not enough cash for free diapers. We spent the diaper money: That ship has sailed; that diaper is filled. No society has ever owed as much as we do, and certainly no society has ever had to give it back. The government of the United States has to pay off $16 trillion just to get back to having nothing. Officially. And yet, in Hemingway terms, it’s all been happening so gradually that most of your neighbors remain entirely unaware of how broke we are. We don’t need a Diaper Awareness Day, we need a Multi-Trillion Dollar Debt Awareness Day. Or how about a We’ve Spent All The Money Including The Money For An Awareness-Raising Ribbon Day? Or an Impending Societal Collapse Awareness Day?

So I look on this book as an awareness-raiser. No, there are no ribbons. Make your own damn ribbon. If your local haberdasher went belly up, cut up an old diaper. We need to raise awareness that awareness-raising ribbons are a complete waste of time and a distraction from the things we really need to be aware of. When After America was first published, we were already the Brokest Nation in History. But that’s no reason not to get even broker. On the day the hardback edition came out, the national debt was a mere $14 trillion. One year later it was tickling $16 trillion. It took the United States its first two centuries to run up its first trillion dollars of debt—from 1776 to 1982. Now we rack up a trillion bucks of debt in a mere six or seven months.

Like Hemingway’s protagonist, we are crossing the dangerous line from gradually to suddenly, and inviting sudden, convulsive catastrophe. This is the most predictable, the most spectacular, and certainly the most expensive self-inflicted societal collapse in the history of the planet, and a good half of American citizens refuse to see it. Why, everything would be fine if the rich would just pay their fair share. We are not broke, insists Van Jones, Obama’s former green jobs czar and bespoke Communist. We were robbed, we were robbed. And somebody has our money!

The somebody who has our money is the government. They waste it on self-aggrandizing ideologue nitwits like Van Jones and his green jobs racket. Every day these guys burn through so much that they can never bridge the gap. Under the 2011 budget, the government of the United States spent $188 million every hour that it didn’t have. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Ramadan. So how many of the rich would you require to cover that shortfall? Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, President Obama told the American people in his 2012 State of the Union. Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense. And not only is it common sense, argued Obama, but it will help us close our deficit.

Who knew it was that easy?

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obama’s Buffett Rule will raise—stand well back—$3.2 billion per year. Which is what the United States government currently borrows every seventeen hours. So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years from Obama’s 2012 State of the Union is the year 2526.

Do you remember Zager & Evans’ futuristic pop hit from the psychedelic Sixties, In The Year 2525? The year 2526 is so far out it’s the year after the year 2525. All together now:

In the year 2525

If man is still alive

If woman should survive

They’ll only be twelve months away from paying off Obama’s 2011 budget deficit...

A nation that takes seriously the Buffett Rule and the other mangy and emaciated rabbits the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper is certainly in need of having its awareness of basic arithmetic raised. For what Big Government is spending, there aren’t enough of the rich—and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the government of the United States, they would blow through it within four and a half days. Okay, so who’s the fourth richest guy? He’s French. And the fifth guy’s a Spaniard. Number six is Larry Ellison. He’s American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States government going for a week. The next richest American is Christy Walton of Walmart, and she’s barely a semi-Buffett. So her $25 billion will see you through a couple days of the second week. There aren’t a lot of other semi-Buffetts, but, if you scrounge around you can rustle up some hemi-demi-semi-Buffetts: If you confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, it comes to $1.5 trillion, which is a little less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion.

So maybe after we’ve burned through Warren & Co’s stash, a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs can be persuaded to emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.

But there are a lot of you millionaires out there, depending on how one understands the term. Jerry Brown, California’s reborn Governor Moonbeam, defines his millionaire’s tax as applying to anybody who earns more than $250,000 a year. Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly, he explained. You just need four years. This may be the simplest wealth-creation advice since Bob Hope was asked to respond to news stories that he was worth half-a-billion dollars. Anyone can do it, said Hope. All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years.

It’s that easy, folks! Like President Obama says, all you have to do to pay off his 2011 deficit is save 3.2 billion dollars a year for 500 years.

He thinks you’re stupid. Warren Buffett thinks you’re stupid. Maybe you are. But not everyone is. And America’s foreign creditors understand that the Buffett Rule is just another pathetic sleight of hand en route to the collapse of the U.S. dollar, and of American society shortly thereafter.

BY THE NUMBERS

Obama’s plan to balance the 2011 budget by 2526 is indicative not so much of common sense as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. The Democrats could sacrifice the virgin daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending and the debt gods would barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch of acknowledgement.

At this point, it’s traditional for pundits to warn that if we don’t change course we’re going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, bad as it is, our national debt is not as bad as that of Athens—which is true, although it’s worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland, and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America’s deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece’s—although it’s worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.

But these comparisons don’t take into account America’s state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. So, if Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we’re face down in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you factor in unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent—or getting on for twice as much as the second most insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.

And if you’re thinking, wow, all these percentages are making my head hurt, forget ’em, they’re irrelevant. When you’re spending on the scale Washington does, what matters is the hard dollar numbers. In the average Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would be a rounding error. The president’s first term added $5 trillion to the debt—a uniquely American scale of catastrophe. Comparisons are pointless because we’re outspending everybody put together, and then some. But since you ask:

• The typical budget deficit of the Obama years is about $1.3 trillion—or the equivalent of the GDP of Australia.

• The total national debt of the United States is just under $16 trillion—or the equivalent of the GDP of the entire European Union.

• If you throw in our state debt, that’s another $1.1 trillion—or about the GDP of Mexico.

• If you take our municipal debt, that’s another one-and-three-quarter trillion—or about the GDP of Canada.

• America now has over a trillion dollars in college debt—or about the GDP of South Korea, just in one small boutique niche market of debt that has no real equivalent in other countries.

• According to the Federal Reserve, our total debt—federal, state, local, personal, business—is over $57 trillion, or just under the GDP of the entire planet.

• Which means every American owes a little under $200,000. Every single man, woman, kindergartner, and nonagenarian retiree owes a fifth of a million bucks. Every American newborn emerges into the maternity ward with a debt burden of 200 grand in his bassinette. And every family in the United States owes just under $700,000—or about the budget deficit of the government of Liechtenstein. And, being Europe’s wealthiest monarch, His Serene Highness Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it a lot more easily than you can.

• And if you add up the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, plus the long-term defense obligations, economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff reckons the real figure of American indebtedness is about $211 trillion—or about three times the GDP of the planet plus the GDP of whatever racket the Martians and Venusians have got going up there.

• Meanwhile, the average American family has savings of about four grand. You do the math. But very few of us do, do we?

What serious action is being contemplated? Not to reverse and improve the situation, but just to slow the rate of deterioration, get it back to something closer to Hemingway’s gradually. A week before After America came out in 2011, the nation (or at any rate its ruling class) was agog about whether Washington would reach a budget deal before the clock chimed midnight on August 2, at which grim stroke America’s glittering coach would turn back into a pumpkin, and Air Force One back into a large zucchini with two stick-on wings of President Obama’s beloved arugula, flapping limply. (I may be overextending my metaphor here.) CNN offered hours of dramatic footage of Washington eminences shuttling hither and yon as the deadline approached.

This was classic Beltway kabuki, wrapped up with a—surprise!—last-minute deal. In return for raising the debt ceiling, House Speaker John Boehner bragged that he’d got an agreement for a real, enforceable cut of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers for themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY2012.

Question: Which of these figures is accurate?

$7 billion

$1 billion

The correct answer is: Who cares? The $7 billion real, enforceable cut represents what the government of the United States currently borrows every thirty-seven hours. Between the announcement of the deal at the end of the week and the spinmeisters descending on the Sunday talk shows to spin it, the United States had borrowed back every dime of those painstakingly negotiated savings.

If the CBO’s $1 billion figure is correct, then the cut represents what the United States borrows every five hours and twenty minutes. In other words, in less time than it takes to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows parts 1 and 2 with a break for a quick game of Quidditch in between, all those savings will have been borrowed back. A month of intense, fevered, non-stop shuttling back and forth between the Capitol and the White House for a real, enforceable cut of one afternoon’s borrowing.

Bonus question: How real and enforceable are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion.

Oh, well. Better luck next time.

THE MEAN-SPIRITED KID vs. THE COMPLACENT CABALLERO

In the course of a typical day, I usually receive at least a couple of emails from readers lamenting that America is now the Titanic. This is grossly unfair to the Titanic, a state-of-the-art ship whose problem was that it only had lifeboat space for about half its passengers. By contrast, the USS Spendaholic is a rusting hulk encrusted with barnacles, there are no lifeboats, and the ship’s officers are locked in a debate about whether to use a thimble or an eggcup. Yes, it’s difficult to reform the entitlements. But almost everywhere you look in this great land there’s world-beating government waste staring you in the face. How hard can it be to cut even a footling amount of government spending?

All but impossible, unfortunately. You can promise not to starve the widows and orphans, but Harry Reid, the Democrats’ head honcho in the Senate, will still flay you for your Republican mean-spiritedness.

The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 ... eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts, thundered Reid on the Senate floor in 2011. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy-poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.

Did you know American tax dollars funded cowboy poetry? Why not? It creates jobs. After all, where there are taxpayer-funded cowboy poets, there must surely be cowboy-poetry festival administrators, and a Bureau of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Licensing, and cowboy-poetry festival administration grant-writers, and a Department of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Administration Grant Application Processing, and professors of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Educational Workshop Management at dozens of American colleges credentialing thousands of cowboy-poetry festival workshop coordinating majors every year.

It all adds up. In western railroad halts where the Last Chance Saloon shuttered in 1893, dusty one-horse towns are now glittering one-grant towns, where elderly hoochie-koochie dancers are being re-trained to lead rewarding lives as inspectors from the Agency of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Handicapped-Access Compliance. Used to be a man could ride the range for days on end under lonesome skies with nuthin’ on the horizon ’cept a withered mesquite and a clump of sagebrush, but now all you see are clouds of dust and all you hear’s the mighty roar of thundering hooves as every gnarled ol’ wrangler in the territory races for the last hitching post outside creative writing class.

What do you need to write cowboy-poetry? Words like tumbleweed and chaps. Also trochees, spondees, and dactyls. Pencil and paper. Total cost: 79 cents. Maybe you and a half-dozen other cowboy poets like to book the back room at the local bar once a month for an evening of cowboy-poetry and a few beers. Total cost: couple hundred bucks. Maybe folks get word and you figure you should get a bigger room and invite the public and charge a $3 admission. Why does any of this require national subsidies managed by a distant bureaucracy thousands of miles away?

Because these days, what doesn’t? Once upon a time, the cowboy embodied the rugged individualism of the frontier. In Harry Reid’s world, the cowboy embodies dependency without end. To preserve the tradition, it is necessary to invert everything the tradition represents: from true grit to federally funded grit—you could hardly ask for a more poignant emblem of America in the Dead Wood Stage.

Oh, c’mon, you say, what’s the big deal? It’s chump change, a couple of saddlebags in small bills. Not a large sum. But then when you’re Harry Reid staggering around in your trillion-gallon hat, it’s all small potatoes, isn’t it?

I always enjoy those stories that crop up periodically on the local news in which some 700-pound guy who can’t get out of bed needs to go to the hospital, and the fire department has to slice off the upper-level clapboards and framing to winch him out. When you’re 50 pounds overweight, it’s worth laying off the pasta and desserts. When you’re 500 pounds over, you just lie there and wait for someone else to keep the chow coming—the Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, Russians.... Hey, what difference does it make? And if the bed sores get too bad, the Beijing Fire Department will be there to saw the wall off and get you outta there. After all, it’s in their interest, right?

Harry Reid and the gang seem to be living their version of the old line: if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. America owes the world $16 trillion, so the world has a problem. And, if it’s the world’s problem, why bother our pretty little heads about it?

A Baltimore reader sent me his guide to crisis management in advanced democracies:

Phase 1) A crisis is coming. But we still have time. There’s no need to act yet.

Phase 2) Yes, a crisis is coming. But we still have time. There’s no need to act yet.

Phase 3) We’re out of time. There’s no reason to act, because it’s too late.

Much of the political establishment talks as if we’re in Phase Two—sure, this stuff is a problem but not until 2080, 2060, whenever. But they act as if we’re in Phase Three—when Harry Reid says that we cannot contemplate doing anything as mean-spirited as a $50,000 cut to a poetry festival in Elko, he’s telling you it’s over.

Aside from cowboy-poetry, what else do we get for a four-trillion-dollar federal budget? Less than you’d think. The bigger Big Government gets, the less you have to show for it. In chapter one, I quote the deputy assistant secretary of the interior’s promise to an audience of environmentalists:

You will never see another federal dam.

Ever. That would seem to be a fairly definitive pronouncement by the Obama administration. Yet in the run-up to the 2012 election, a remarkably dishonest president went around pretending that the reason he needs our money is because of all the dams and bridges he’s itching to build. When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, declared Barack Obama, all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.

Through the summer of 2012, he certainly carried it forward from one dam speech to another, but it has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high-school choom gang, back in the days when young Barry insisted to his fellow tokers that all the car windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision a Democrat president opening a twenty-first-century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.

The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million—or about $530 million in 2012 dollars. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.

A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.

Because that’s not what Big Government does in the twenty-first century. Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to eternal dependency. America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats—and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn’t employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team. In 2011 they kicked down a front door in Stockton, California, and handcuffed Kenneth Wright (erroneously, as it turned out) in connection with a student loan investigation. We can confirm that we executed a search warrant, said Department of Education spokesperson Gina Burress.

The Department of Education executes search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education minister has his own paramilitary commandos.

The following year, 2012, Stockton declared bankruptcy. It is a city in an accelerating process of de-civilization: garbage-strewn and vandalized, with little sign of civic order other than faded yellow crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze. And yet the mighty commissars of the distant imperial metropolis were able to dispatch the Schoolyard Delta Force from the other side of the continent.

The educrat SWAT team is what Obama & Co. call investing in the future. Because that’s what investing in the future means: More. More of the more that got us into this mess. More forms, more paperwork, more bureaucrats. More more more. The Radio City Rockette line of regulators. The Incredible Hulk of TSA crotch inspectors. The Waterworld of 1099s. The King Kong of spendaholic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end gobbling your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion borrowed dollars every hour of the day.

BULL MARKET

When this book came out, I was asked by several interviewers about the controversial cover. Which is nothing to do with me, not really. Yes, I signed off on it, but via a low-res email attachment printed out on an unreliable copier running low on toner, and anyway I was running late and on my way out the door. So I said, Sure. Whatever. And about a half-hour up the road I had a momentary pang of doubt: Uncle Sam in the morgue with a toe tag? Isn’t that a wee bit offensive? And if I’d had cell reception in that corner of the mountains, I’d probably have called the office and nixed it.

But then I drove on and thought things through. When great nations die, their icons die. There used to be a character called John Bull, a stout countryman in tailcoat, riding boots, breeches, and Union Jack waistcoat. In the nineteenth century, you could find him almost any day of the week in the political cartoons of Punch or the Fleet Street papers—and in the press of Britain’s great-power rivals. He embodied England at its imperial zenith: solid, sensible, genial, reliable, down-to-earth, with the virtues of a rural squire applied geopolitically. Today I doubt one in a hundred British schoolchildren could identify him. In his alleged celebration of the United Kingdom’s heritage at the 2012 Olympic ceremony, cutting-edge director Danny Boyle eschewed John Bull for multiple Mary Poppins figures descending with umbrellas into the stadium—an iconic nanny for the glorious nanny state. John Bull was never formally toe-tagged, but in the Britain of socialized medicine and lifelong welfare, he is dead as dead can be.

Uncle Sam will not survive American bankruptcy any more than John Bull survived British decline. At my website, we posted the first glimpse of After America’s cover on the same day we marked Fourth of July with a salute to that rousing number, You’re a Grand Old Flag. Several readers found the double-bill not altogether compatible, their pleasure in George M. Cohan’s patriotic song undermined by the toe-tagged Uncle Sam. But that’s what’s at stake: From You’re a Grand Old Flag to You’re a Grand Old Tag is a shorter journey than you might think—and since After America was first published, the rate of decay has accelerated. I mention in the prologue that Goldman Sachs predicts China will become the dominant economic power by 2027. They’ve since been trumped by the International Monetary Fund, which says China could be Number One by 2016. That would mean the man who takes the oath of office in Washington in January 2013 will end his term as the first president since Grover Cleveland not to preside over the world’s dominant economy.

That should be a source of shame to every American citizen, and they should demand politicians pledged to restore American greatness. Instead, to much of the elite, it’s something to look forward to. Watching the 2012 Olympic ceremony, Howard Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, tweeted: Brits long ago lost their empire ... but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully. London was only in a position to lose global power gracefully because it was losing it to Washington, its greatest son. No matter how well America learns to lose gracefully, it’s still losing to far less benign forces than Britain was.

I’m not a federally licensed, taxpayer-funded official cowboy poet but, out in the desert under big skies riding out to that lonesome horizon, is there room for a little Shelley?

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Obamandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away...

As I say in the pages ahead, if you want to prevent that scenario, you need to start now.

How did you go bankrupt?

Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.

We’ve been going through the gradual phase so long, we’re used to it. But under Obama we’ve run out of gradually; suddenly is about to show up.

PROLOGUE

THE STUPIDITY OF BROKE

There is the moral of all human tales;

’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,

First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.

—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818)

The sun’ll come out tomorrow

Bet your bottom dollar

That tomorrow there’ll be sun

—Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin, Annie (1977)

Previously on Apocalypse Soon ...

It was the worst of times, it was the not quite so worst of times. The predecessor to this book was called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and, given the title, you may be tempted to respond, C’mon, man. You told us last time it was the end of the world. Well, where the hell is it? I want my money back. Instead, you come breezing in with this season’s Armageddonouttahere routine. It’s like Barbra Streisand farewell tours—there’ll be another along next summer.

Well, now: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was about the impending collapse of all of the western world except America.

The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule.

The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.

Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check. But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program but supersized. Heigh-ho.

It starts with the money. In The Run Upon the Bankers (1720), Jonathan Swift wrote:

A baited banker thus desponds,

From his own hand foresees his fall,

They have his soul, who have his bonds;

’Tis like the writing on the wall.

A lot of writing on the wall these days. Who has the bonds of a developed world developed to the point that it’s institutionally conditioned to living beyond its means? Foreigners with money. So who’s available and flush enough? The Chinese Politburo; Saudi sheikhs lubricated with oil but with lavish worldwide ideological proselytizing to fund; Russian businessmen. ... These are not the fellows one might choose to have one’s bonds, never mind one’s soul, but there aren’t a lot of other options.

So it starts with the money—dry stuff about numbers and percentage of GDP. As Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado fumed to a room of voters in 2010, We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it.¹

He’s right—and $13 trillion is the lowest of lowball estimates. But why then did Senator Bennet vote for the stimulus and ObamaCare and all the other trillion-dollar binges his party blew through? Why did Senator Bennet string along and let the 111th Congress (2009–2011) run up more debt than the first one hundred Congresses (1789–1989) combined?² Panicked by pre-election polls into repudiating everything he’d been doing for the previous two years, the senator left it mighty late to rediscover his virtue. You would think that Colorado voters might have remembered that, like Groucho Marx apropos Doris Day, they knew Michael Bennet before he was a virgin. Alas, an indulgent electorate permitted the suddenly abstemious spendaholic to squeak back into office.

And, contra Senator Bennet, eventually you do have something to show for it. It starts with the money, but it doesn’t stop there. It ends with a ruined and reprimitivized planet,