From Mark Steyn commenting about the decline of the United States in “After America”:
Testifying to the House Budget Committee in 2010, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he told the political grandees. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action”…
Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House—Democrat, Republican, bit of both. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. A president of one party and a Congress of the other? Up and up it goes…
If Europe’s somewhat agreeable post-war decline was cushioned by America, who’s volunteering to do the cushioning for America? There is no good answer to that question.