របៀបដែល ហ៊ុន សែន របស់កម្ពុជាកំពុងលេងពិភពលោក និងទិញពេលវេលា

 2: BEYOND SELF-DELUSION

Americans must understand that our strength abroad will depend increasingly on our ability to confront problems at home. Deliberate national decisions regarding necessary systemic improvements are now the essential precondition to any reasonable assessment of America's global prospects. This calls for clear-headed awareness on the part of Americans regarding their country's defining vulnerabilities as well as its residual global strengths. A coolheaded appraisal is the necessary point of departure for the reforms that are essential if America is to retain its position of global leadership while protecting the fundamental values of its domestic order.

Six critical dimensions stand out as America's major, and increasingly threatening, liabilities:

First is America's mounting and eventually unsustainable national debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office's August 2010 "Budget and Economic Outlook," American public debt as a percentage of GDP stood at around 60%—a troubling number, but one that puts the United States in league with the worst global offenders (Japan's national debt, for example, stands at around 115% of GDP according to OECD net debt figures, though most of it is owned by the Japanese themselves; Greece and Italy each are at about 100%). But structural budgetary deficits driven by the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation portend a significant long-term challenge. According to an April 2010 Brookings Institution study projecting the US debt under varied assumptions, the Obama administration's existing budget would have the US national debt surpass the post-World War II high of 108.6% of GDP by 2025. Given that paying for this spending trajectory would require a substantial tax increase for which as of now there is no national will, the inescapable reality is that growing national indebtedness will increase US vulnerability to the machinations of major creditor nations such as China, threaten the status of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, undermine America's role as the world's preeminent economic model and, in turn, its leadership in such organizations as the G-20, World Bank, and IMF, and limit its ability to improve itself domestically and, at some point even, to raise the capital required to fight necessary wars.

America's grim prospects have recently been pithily summed up by two experienced public policy advocates, R. C. Altman and R. N. Haass, in their 2010 Foreign Affairs article "American Profligacy and American Power." In these grim words: "The past 2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic.... The United States is fast approaching a historic turning point: either it will act to get its fiscal house in order, thereby restoring the prerequisites of its primacy in the world, or it will fail to do so and suffer both the domestic and international consequences." If America continues to put off instituting a serious reform plan that simultaneously reduces spending and increases revenue, the United States will likely face a fate similar to the previous fiscally crippled great powers, whether ancient Rome or twentieth-century Great Britain.

Second, America's flawed financial system is a major liability. It presents twin vulnerabilities: First, it is a systemic time bomb that threatens not only the American but also the global economy because of its risky and self-aggrandizing behavior. And second, it has produced a moral hazard that causes outrage at home and undermines America's appeal abroad by intensifying America's social dilemmas. The excess, imbalance, and recklessness of America's investment banks and trading houses-abetted by congressional irresponsibility regarding deregulation and the financing of home ownership, and driven by greedy Wall Street speculators-precipitated the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession, inflicting economic hardship on millions.

Making matters worse, financial speculators both in banks and in hedge funds, effectively immune to shareholder control, reaped enormous personal profits without the redeeming benefits of economic innovation or job creation. The 2008 crisis also revealed the striking disconnect already noted between the lives of those at the top of the financial system and the rest of the country, not to mention the developing world. In fact, according to a 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, the ratio of financial sector wages to those in the rest of the private economy exceeded 1.7 just prior to the 2008 financial crisis-levels not seen since before World War II. A reformation of the financial system through the implementation of simple but effective regulation, which increases transparency and accountability while promoting overall economic growth, is "necessary to ensure that the United States remains economically competitive.

Third, widening income inequality coupled with stagnating social mobility is a long-term danger to social consensus and democratic stability, two conditions necessary for sustaining an effective US foreign policy. According to the US Census Bureau, since 1980 America has been experiencing a significant increase in income inequality: in 1980, the top 5% of households pocketed 16.5% of total national income, while the bottom 40% of households received 14.4%; by 2008, those disparities widened to 21.5% and 12%, respectively. The distribution not of annual income but of owned wealth by families was even more skewed: according to the Federal Reserve, in 2007 the richest 1% of US families possessed a staggering share of 33.8% of total net US national wealth, while the bottom 50% of American families accounted for only 2.5%.

This trend has launched the United States to the top of global indexes of both income and wealth inequality, making America the most unequal major developed country in the world (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Such income inequality might be more palatable if accompanied by social mobility, in keeping with notions of the American dream. But US social mobility has been essentially stagnant over the past few decades while at the same time income inequality has been rising. In fact, recent data for the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality cited in Figure 2.1, indicates that the United States ranks worst among the major economies, roughly on a par with China and Russia, with only Brazil among the major developing countries posting higher levels of inequality.

Moreover, recent studies comparing US intergenerational earnings mobility to those of various European countries show that overall economic mobility is actually lower in "the land of opportunity" than in the rest of the developed world. Worse still, America now lags behind some European countries in the rate of upward income mobility. One of the principal causes has been America's deficient public education system. According to the OECD, America spends one of the highest amounts per pupil on its primary and secondary education, yet has some of the lowest test scores in the industrialized world. That condition saps America's economic prospects by leaving swaths of human"

capital untapped while degrading the global appeal of the American system.

FIGURE 2.1 INCOME INEQUALITY

(From most unequal to least)

SOURCE: CIA World Factbook

YEAR GINI

Brazil 2005

USA 2007

Russia 2009

China 2007

Japan 2008

Indonesia 2009

India 2004

UK 2005

France 2008

Italy 2006

EU 2009

Germany 2006

FIGURE 2.2 SHARE OF TOTAL NATIONAL WEALTH

SOURCE: UN University, 2/2008 report

YEAR, UNIT TOP 10% BOTTOM 50%

USA 2001, family 69.8% 2.8%

UK 2000, adult 56.0% 5.0%

Japan 1999, household 39.3% 13.9%

Italy 2000, household 48.5% 7.0% (bottom 40%)

Indonesia 1997, household 65.4% 5.1%

India 2002-03, household 52.9% 8.1%

Germany 1998, household 44.4% 3.9%

France 1994, person 61.0% NA

China 2002, person 41.4% 14.4%

Canada 1999, family unit 53.0% 6.0%

Australia 2002, household 45.0% 9.0%

"America's fourth liability is its decaying national infrastructure. While China is building new airports and highways, and Europe, Japan, and now China possess advanced high-speed rail, America's equivalents are sliding back into the twentieth century. China alone has bullet trains on almost 5,000 kilometers of rails, while the United States has none. Beijing and Shanghai airports are decades ahead in efficiency as well as elegance of their equivalents in Washington and in New York, both of which increasingly smack embarrassingly of the third world. On a symbolic level, the fact that China-in rural and small-town respects still a premodern society is now moving ahead of the United States in such highly visible examples of twenty-first-century structural innovation speaks volumes.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its 2009 report card of America's infrastructure, put America's overall grade at an abysmal D; this included a D in aviation, a C-in rail, a D-in roads, and a D+ in energy. Urban renewal has been slow, with slums and deteriorating public housing in numerous cities— including even the nation's capital—a testimonial to social neglect. A mere train ride from New York City to Washington, DC (on the slow-moving and shaking Acela, America's "high-speed" train) offers from its railcar windows a depressing spectacle of America's infrastructural stagnation, in contrast to the societal innovation that characterized America during much of the twentieth century.

Reliable infrastructure is essential to economic efficiency and economic growth and simultaneously symbolic of a nation's overall dynamism. Historically, the systemic success of leading nations has been judged, in part, on the condition and ingenuity of national infrastructure from the roads and aqueducts of the Romans to the railroads of the British. The state of American infrastructure, as indicated above, is now more representative of a deteriorating power than of the world's most innovative economy. And, as America's infrastructure continues to decay it will inevitably impact its economic output, probably at a time of even greater competition with emerging powers. In a world where systemic rivalry between the United States and China is likely to intensify, decaying infrastructure will be both symbolic and symptomatic of the American malaise."