There are uprisings sweeping the Arab region, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, with varying intensity between one country and another. Some leaders were ousted, others are on their way, and I believe that other leaders will survive until further notice. A professional journalist like myself is thus supposed to be preoccupied with these revolutions above all else. However, I found myself immersed, over the last week, in news on the U.S. economy. I hear the reader's voice here asking me: Why then? The traditional answer to this is the known principle that if the U.S. economy sneezes, then the world economy would catch a cold. To go further, I would like to remind the reader that when the U.S. economy went through a financial crisis in 2008, the latter instantly became a global crisis that spared no country, even if that country was Arab one and was outside the world economy, and perhaps even outside the world itself, in the first place. This time, I became concerned about the global economy, and subsequently the economy of the UK where I live, and my own personal finances, after a warning was issued by Standard & Poor's, which said that the U.S. may lose its prized Triple-A (AAA) rating, and cut its outlook on the U.S. from ‘stable' to ‘negative', unless it delivers, within two years, a plan to end the chronic and ongoing deficit in its annual budget. This warning was issued against the backdrop of the confrontation between the White House and the Congress over the budget, which threatened to cause a government shutdown over the short term, and exposed the ability to reach an agreement, over the long term, to curb the budget deficit growing since 2001. For the first time in 70 years, the U.S. rating agency warned that failure to reach an agreement over tackling the deficit will cause the rating of the U.S. to be downgraded, which means that it would have to pay higher interest when borrowing, further exacerbating the deficit that the country is supposed to tackle. Meanwhile, I read that the U.S. national debt increased from 40 percent of the GDP before the crisis of 2008 to 60 percent last year, and is expected to reach 84 percent in 2013. In addition, the IMF said that the U.S. budget deficit in 2011 alone amounted to 10.8 percent and warned that the country's debt would amount to 70 percent of the GDP. What do the percentages above mean? The U.S. economy is the largest economy in the world, and the greenback is the primary reserve currency. If we translate these percentages into numbers, we would find that they all involve amounts in the trillions of dollars. Last year, the GDP reached 14.7 trillion dollars, and Standard & Poor's says that any economic rescue package following a new financial crisis will cost the American taxpayer […] five trillion dollars. I also read that the national debt reached nine trillion dollars last year, and will reach 17.3 trillion in 2020 unless the Congress finds a way to curb the ongoing deficit. In a speech this week, President Obama downplayed the significance of the warnings of a new crisis, while Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared in three different financial TV programs to deny that there is a crisis, which means that there is one indeed. Once again, I say that I would not have wrote on this subject amid the Arab revolutions of rage, had I not believed that the crisis will affect us along with everyone else. I insist that the recent crisis and any upcoming one are the result of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Bush inherited a surplus of one trillion dollars from Bill Clinton, and singlehandedly destroyed the U.S. economy as he borrowed from China to wage war in Afghanistan then Iraq, and a fictitious war on terror. America then paid along with us the price for this policy of neo-colonialism planned by the neoconservatives, who are in their majority American Likudnik supporters of Israel. Today, those same extremists who pushed the U.S. economy into the quandary of imperial dreams are blaming Barack Obama for a crisis that is the working of their own hands, and which took place in a time that we all bore witness to. The Likudnik websites attack Obama every day, and accuse him of what the advocates of Israel are guilty of. Yet, he does not respond, and continues to attempt to engage people who have no decency or sense of shame. These people are of such arrogance that they seek to reduce all spending, including aid to the sick and the poor, while continuing to spend on defense whose budget amounts to 700 billion dollars, or more than the defense budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen settled the debate by saying that the threat posed by the fiscal deficit to U.S. security is bigger than the threat of terrorism. In Arabic, this means that the U.S. deficit is more dangerous to the economy of the Arab region than anything else. [email protected]
