>>SOUTHERN INDIANA —  

“Don’t let it bring you down, it’s only castles burning.”

— Neil Young

America has a staggering budget deficit of $1.6 trillion. It is fighting two wars on the other side of the planet.

It has apocalyptic public debt of more than $12.5 trillion, which, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock, increases $3.87 billion a day. Wall Street has been in the hands of snake oil salesmen we don’t trust with Yale and Harvard degrees. The U.S. auto industry came close to collapse and Toyota seems to be trying.

There were 75.8 million Americans born during the Baby Boom years (1946 - 1964) who are entering the pay back years for their Social Security. I think of how many prescription drugs they will be gobbling, how many doctors, surgeons and nurses they will need as they grow old, and I shudder.

On top of these amazing demographics, we have a political situation in Washington that is in shambles. President Obama is pushing through health reforms that supporters like U.S. Rep. Baron Hill say will reduce the federal deficit by $132 billion over the first 10 years and up to $1.3 trillion in the decade beyond. Republican opponents of the health reforms say they are budget busters (how can anything be more busted than it is now?) and want Congress to “start over.”

Now, for the real warning. I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s analysis in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “Complexity and Collapse.” When we talk about waning empires, most of us think they occur over decades or centuries. But it took the Roman empire a mere five decades to collapse, with the city of Rome reduced by 75 percent in that timeframe. The Ming Dynasty in China dissolved much quicker. “The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade,” he writes. The Bourbon monarchy in France “passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity” with its role in the American Revolution to 1789, when a financial crisis summoned the Estates-General which “unleashed a political chain reaction that led to a swift collapse.”

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires quickly died following The Great War, a conflict no one expected before August 1914. The British empire dwindled from Yalta in 1945 to 1956 when 13 colonies spun into independence.

And within most of our lives, there were the Soviets. No one in March 1985 was predicting the Soviet Union would unravel and collapse in a mere six years, including my colleagues and professors at the Indiana University Russian and East European Institute. But that’s what happened.

Ferguson writes, “If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for the United States today?”

And this “today” comes a mere year and a half after Wall Street and the world wide financial structure came within hours of collapse. Ferguson explains that it is the “precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policy-makers and citizens. Most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crisis. All the above cases were marked by the sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt.”

All a Hoosier has to do is go one state west to find Illinois with an $11 billion deficit, with Gov. Quinn proposing the borrowing of $4 billion for a short-term patch. U.S. public debt is expected to reach $14.3 trillion in 2019. Interest payments that you, dear citizen, must pay, will go from 8 percent of federal revenues to 17 percent during the same span.

Ferguson writes that while the numbers are “bad,” in the “realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as critical.” Here’s his scary prediction: “One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency — will make headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle.

Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, but also the public at large.”

When I look at the petty gamesmanship in Washington and the race for advantage heading into the November elections, I am coming to the conclusion that this past generation of political leadership has exposed America to dangers in ways few of us truly understand. But these anxiety pangs are throbbing across the state at Tea Party events and those of us with progressive views.

I hope I’m not the butterfly in the Amazon.