New York Times Op-Ed
By Nicholas Kristof, July 23, 2011
[Editor’s note: I post this here because the US debt is symbolic of the ponzi scheme of money per se. With banks lending around $9 (or more) for every dollar of collateral they hold, Frederic Soddy’s 1921 treatise on money and degrowth (he didn’t call it that) makes for current reading on a key issue of convivial degrowth.]
If China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage. Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists… House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
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