Raymond Feist’s Rise of a Merchant Prince is a rarity in fantasy literature: it gets down into the nuts and bolts of economics in a fantasy world. In particular, it (and later books) focuses on how a feudal kingdom finances its wars. Spoiler alert: the good guys win, but the crown is bankrupt and there’s no chance the financiers will be able to recover their debts from the ruins.
This is the thing the warmongers in the Democrats and the sabre-rattlers on social media can’t seem to comprehend: wars are expensive. Ruinously so, the longer they drag on. Britain only recently finished paying off its WWII debts to the USA.
That’s right: contrary to the free money and weapons splashed by the Biden administration, Democrat hero FDR loaned Britain the means to hold back the Nazi onslaught – and demanded repayment in full. At the same time the Democrats rewarded defeated Nazi Germany by rebuilding the country for free, it beggared Britain for decades. Tell us again how Trump is ‘rewarding Putin’.
So, while nearly all of the normiecon cucks in the mainstream media faint and clutch their pearls over President Trump’s tariffs and Ukraine peace negotiations, at least one makes the sensible observation normally obscured by media TDS. That is, America is broke and it just can’t afford yet another Forever War.
Donald Trump’s plans to up-end the global trading system by imposing hefty tariffs on even US allies have shocked and infuriated elite opinion everywhere. So has his refusal to offer formal security guarantees to Ukraine and seeming total lack of interest in continuing the US-led proxy war with Russia.
While Trump’s rhetorical justifications vary, these policies likely have the same underlying economic cause. The American fiscal position is diabolically bad.
The screeching, Trump-deranged MSM are either completely clueless on this (most likely), or are simply so deranged that they’re lying by reflex (also likely. In fact, it’s certainly both). Because anyone who takes more than a second’s look at America’s finances knows that this can’t go on.
The US has World War II levels of debt without having remotely fought a world war. Public debt as a share of GDP in the US is already 100 per cent and on track for 118 per cent within a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Spending on interest already exceeds spending on the military. US budget deficits of $US2 trillion ($3.1 trillion) a year, more than 6 per cent of GDP, have been pencilled in as far as the eye can see.
As the minter of the world’s reserve currency the US can get away with such profligacy for a lot longer than other nations but not forever. The Afghanistan quagmire cost the US more than $US1 trillion across 20 years according to estimates from Brown University. Imagine the cost of a conventional war with Russia on the other side of the world.
For all the Australian MSM fainting aunts blithering about whether Ukraine means that an ‘isolationist’ USA would help Australia or Taiwan, none of them are asking the simple question: with what? How?
Trump’s highly controversial plans to jack up tariffs can be seen as a covert way to raise revenues without resorting to politically toxic tax increases.
Indeed, Republicans can even say tariffs are not about revenue but the politically appealing goal of “bringing jobs home”, however much economists may dispute that likelihood. Think of the tariffs as a consumption tax that would never be passed by a Republican-controlled Senate.
In 2024 the Washington-based Tax Foundation estimated that a 20 per cent universal tariff, the sort of which Trump has proposed repeatedly, would raise more than $US3 trillion across the decade to 2035. That’s serious money, enough to at least dent the extraordinary $US2 trillion in annual deficits Washington has pencilled in for years.
Choose tariffs or fiscal collapse, they are the only two choices.
Don’t count on the feckless Europeans, either. If they get their way and plunge the world into global war for a third time, they’ll surrender even faster than last time. Because they’re broke, too.
They are in no position to wage a serious or sustained war without huge and politically disastrous spending cuts.
Indeed, the top marginal income tax rates of totalitarian Russia and communist China are both lower, significantly so in Russia’s case, than those in Australia, Europe and even the US: 22 per cent in Russia (where most Russians pay 13 per cent) and 45 per cent in China, a little below Australia’s top 47 per cent rate.
The most infuriating thing in all this mess is that it’s entirely as a result of the cretinous elite class and their MSM lickspittles. From ‘Net Zero’ to Covid, they have systematically ruined our economies and destroyed our industrial base. Even industrial powerhouse Germany is losing its biggest industries, solely because of the punishing cost of ‘renewable’ energy.
The same people who cheered those policies are often the same ones demanding the US fund a forever war in Europe.
Where are Germany’s industrial titans relocating? China.
You couldn’t make this up: the totalitarian dictatorship solely responsible for Covid is reaping the rewards of the chaos of elite idiocy they unleashed. Seeing as they’re so keen on WWII analogies, they’ve rewarded Hitler’s invasion of Poland by moving all their industries there and buying cheap ‘Made in the Third Reich’ goods made by camp labour.
And they have the nerve to call Trump ‘Putin’s puppet’.
