Peering across the border just six miles to the south of me, I wonder if there is something in either the air or water that has contaminated the brains of our southern neighbours.
Surely they must be squirrelly, if you look at recent headlines.
As I type this, discussions are on to raise the United State's federal government debt ceiling, otherwise the country is in real risk of defaulting on its debt. You think Ireland, Portugal, Spain or Greece had it bad? If the United States defaults on its debt, we're talking fiscal apocalypse.
How high is that debt ceiling? Just a measley $14.3 trillion dollars. My desk calculator literally cannot fit that many zeros onto its screen.
Where does this debt come from? Socialized health care? Not bloody likely. Nope, it comes from the idea that taxes are always bad and can never be raised and that what the military wants, it gets. Right now, it has three wars going on, maybe four - Afghanistan, Iraq (almost wound down, but not quite), Libya and Yemen.
I remember reading a book about military aircraft written around 1984 by Bill Gunston. It noted that the way trends were looking for the cost of front-line fighter aircraft, in a few decades, the United States Air Force and Navy could buy one aircraft a year, and use it every other day and half a day on Sundays. The costs of both the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II are not far off that 30-year-old projection. Yet they are buying hundreds of F-22s and thousands of F-35s.
A most interesting blog on U.S. military items is Wired.com's Danger Room. It recently reported on the over-budget new ships the U.S. Navy has begun to build, called the Littoral Combat Ship. It has a funky trimaran hull, and looks out of this world. But because it has become so expensive, some cutbacks needed to be made. On the U.S.S. Independence, which was made out of aluminum instead of steel like most ships, they cut back a little too far - and neglected to install a cathodic protection system. Now, a year old, the ship is literally corroding away into nothingness, at least around the engine mounts.
But that's okay if corrosion is making ships disappear, because the army is spending plenty of money developing giant frickin' lasers mounted on trucks to make other things disappear, or at least fry. Unfortunately they don't actually fit on trucks. Maybe they can use the one mounted on a 747 instead, the one that cost $5.2 billion.
Then there's Minnesota, whose government shut down July 1 and has no plans to re-open. I understand what a postal strike is. I've seen public sector unions go out on the picket line. But for the government of an entire state, or even nation, to 'shut down?' It's becoming more and more routine.
This is apparently because hard-headed politicians keep playing chicken, all the while running up the debt clock, in nearly all jurisdictions.
The United States needs to have the wakeup call that Canada heard in the early 1990s. The federal government, and nearly all the provinces, realized they were rapidly going broke (kind of like the U.S. federal government is right now). They enacted substantial cutbacks and through some serious pain, turned their budgets around. In a few years, nearly all of Canada's provinces, and the federal government, were in the black. Former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow used to talk about going to New York to deal with bankers to keep the province solvent.
Most Canadian provinces, along with the feds, have backslid on that note on account of the recession. Saskatchewan is one of the few that has kept its head above water. Our governments had better relearn how to curtail spending again, lest we find ourselves in the same predicament the United States is now in.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
