The U.S. has a good government helping her citizens to have a high GDP per capita (GDPPP=$56200). The government can provide full employment, maintain growth of GDP and manage a peaceful society with a high standard of living. As the world is developing and each nation must compete in economic development, the U.S. government has managed the country’s economy achieving the above condition. Then in comparison, the U.S. government is a good government. The U.S. has maintained its number one economy status since WW II. Post war, she became the strongest nation in the world making American citizens proud and possessing richest household goods. All over the World, people wanted to migrate to the U.S. for education, job opportunity and better life. The U.S. has led the world against communism and authoritarian governments; we have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union making us the real superpower in the world. American citizens felt exceptional; the U.S. government has been definitely good to her citizens.
 
Of course, every country in the world is also trying to improve its economic status following industrialization, technology advancement and social economic and political development. While the world is envying the U.S., she made some changes, most notably in shifting her manufacturing-based economy to a service oriented economy, particularly pioneering and expanding the financial industry. The financial industry may be characterized by a new discipline - financial engineering, creating many sophisticated financial products and enriching the U.S. stock markets and investors. In an agriculture and manufacturing-based economy, people produce real products, earn profits and pay their debts and interests. With financial engineering, virtual products can be created, debts and loans can be refinanced, and the financial business volume can overwhelm the real production-based economy. The U.S. is innovating and leading in the financial world making huge profits even though the industry does not support as many jobs as the manufacturing and agriculture did. In addition, the blooming of financial industry encouraged borrowing and debt servicing from governments to corporations to citizens, such as treasury bills, bonds, consumer credits and housing mortgages. It becomes simple to issue large debt and kick the principle payback responsibility to next government or future generations. The elected officials typically nearsighted giving up long-term global view over local interest simply love doing the easiest task and kick the can.
 
The above trend is transforming the world into a debt driven economy making many governments spending beyond their means. The national central banks must manage the cash flow and debt refinancing under its credit rating. The U.S. has one advantage over other countries ever since she abolished the parity of dollars to gold and made the dollars as the principle currency for settlement of international trade. The U.S. government can always print dollars to support treasury bills or bonds hence there is no default risk. Other countries’ treasury bills or bonds are subject to the fluctuation of their exchange rates with the U.S. dollar. When a country has economic problem, due to inflation, social unrest or war, its currency may drastically reduce in value against the U.S. dollar and get into a default mode. The debt holder may demand payback in real assets causing the default country losing a huge size of assets in terms of real estates, mineral rights, agriculture productions, etc. at a cheap price. The U.S. and many international investors have taken advantages of the above situation to either make a killing to fatten their assets or solving their own debt problems with the looted profit. In the past seventy years, there were numerous financial crises from the energy/oil crisis (1970’s), lost decade in Latin America (1980’s), Japanese asset bubble (1986-1992), savings and loans crisis in U.S. (1986-1995), Mexico (1994), Asian financial crisis (1997), Turkey & 9 -11 (2001), Uruguay, Venezuela (2002-2010), EU debt crisis(2009-2019), Venezuela (2012-now), Ukrainian (2014-now), Brazil (2014-2017) and pandemic (2020-now), these crises were bailed out by investors with U.S. dollars by a simple scheme of raising interest rate on dollars and currency exchange rate to draw the capitals to U.S. financial markets then to buy and invest in cheap assets.
 
The 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the housing bubble in the U.S. The U.S. encouraged 0% down home purchase. When inflation occurred and interest rate was up, home-owners had problems to pay the mortgage interest bursting the housing bubble and collapsed the mortgage backed security market. The U.S. government had to bailout the mortgage and security bankers and insurance companies by printing money and buying debt. Hopefully, the U.S. could raise interest to draw the US dollars back to invest in high profit cheap foreign assets. China and the EU were the two biggest economy for the U.S. to target on when facing its financial crisis. But China decided to launch a huge internal infrastructure program instead of buying more of the U.S. treasury bills with its foreign trade earnings. EU became the target, as a result EU was the biggest foreign sacrifice lamb for the 2008-9 financial crisis. Since then the EU followed the same practice as the U.S. in applying quantitative easing and hiking up huge debt causing EU to enter into a debt crisis over ten years (2009-2019). President Obama (2008-2016) added $8.8 trillion debt over eight years and President Trump (2016-2020) added $8.03 trillion over four years. President Biden in his first year obtained $1.9 trillion for pandemic relief. The debt to GDP ratio of the U.S. is 133% topping $30T (each citizen is in debt of about $100,000) for the first time. The U.S. debt (133%) ranked 12th in the world, lower than Italy (155.8%) and Greece (206%) and higher than Spain (120%) and UK (95%).
 
China received the same pressure from the U.S. dollar attack on international cheap assets. However, China’s law does not allow free conversion to RMB to buy Chinese assets. China’s infrastructure program also enhanced her economy. In 2020, China for the first time issued $4B EU debt with 0% interest and cost of 0.152%, it was sold out in EU with five times over subscription. (Thanks to IMF regarding China’s debt (54-66% of GDP) healthy over her population size and economy reasonable.) Hence, external investors cannot use dollars to create inflation and currency deflation in China to sweep up local assets. Raising national debt may be addictive in dealing with crisis, for example, the pandemic; it is like going to a bar with a group of people agreeing to share the drinking bill. Everyone will drink more to avoid paying for others drinking more. In the end, everyone is drunk with a big bill to pay. The U.S. with its current fiscal policy and economic programs seems to be leading the world to a drunken state, with bills piled up not payable. Someday awakening will arrive, since one cannot kick the debt can down the road forever for the next government to deal with it. We must recognize our problems and think about whether or not our government is doing the right job?
 
The U.S. government is hyping up an anti-China policy which is focusing on sabotaging China's development rather than improving the U.S. competitiveness, by accelerating our infrastructure projects, bringing back key manufacturing industries and joining and cooperating with regional trade organizations. Knowing that we are slipping in GDPPP while China is gaining, American citizens must ponder the question:  Does the U.S. Government serve us well?!




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The military budget of China is $230B, a fraction of the U.S. defense budget, $813B (Biden FY 2023). The U.S. targeted China as the most serious competitor and highlighted with rhetoric that China is a threat to the U.S. and to the world. It is a fact that the military budget of both countries have been increasing since the end of WW II (mutual insecurity complex?), seemingly it can be correlated with the warfare (or inversely peace) of the world (more wars cause insecurity). This is an unfortunate fact which deserves mankind’s attention (especially for Americans): Is the military budget a cause or consequence of warfare? Should citizens of every country have a say on the country’s military budget? In particular, what is the causality logic of the military budget of a great nation with nuclear arsenal? The author was struck by an article published by David Stockman (AntiWar.com, April 7, 2022), entitled, The Warfare State’s Infinitely Mendacious Echo Chamber. This excellent article contains lots of military spending data and facts of war activities, especially the current Ukraine war. It is a great report that every citizen should read. Dr. Wordman would like to append to Stockman’s well-articulated essay with a discussion on the questions posed above. Hopefully, this column will inspire fellow American citizens to take actions, speaking up and writing to their Congressmen to terminate the U.S. being a warfare state.
 
Stockman, a two time Congressman and a director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan Administration, correctly pointed out that the Biden 2023 military budget, $813B, is a “grotesquely large”, being a fountain nourishing the “war fevers, Russophobia and sweeping disinformation that now gushes from the Washington war machine and its auxiliaries in the mainstream media.” To his statement, the present author may add: ‘the hyped China-Threat theory’ has also been feverishly portrayed in the media with an evil motive. Stockman also rightly stated, “the fact is, never before in the history of mankind have economic resources of this gigantic magnitude been showered upon the blob-like military-industrial-intelligence-foreign aid-think tank-NGO-lobbying complex that is now well ensconced in the world’s leading national capital.” Stockman didn’t explicitly discuss whether the gushing of resources is triggering more wars or caused by wars; the current Ukraine-Russia war is a clear example pondering the causality question. The very existence of the huge military budget supporting “the complex” over the years, nurtured NATO, making the U.S. the leader of NATO to become a warfare state, that is a state generating wars all over the world.
 
Stockman described, “there are literally hundreds of thousands of uniformed and civilian government employees and private contractors and consultants operating within the confines of the beltway (DC) and its outlying nodes.” They have vested interest in keeping the military budget growing by inventing and hyping the national security threats to warrant a defense budget of humongous size. What is not explicitly said was that to justify their existence actually induces them to do so. Endless research and study and funds supporting the think tanks, NGOs and consultants to simulate war scenarios and create actual wars and to fuel a massive and exaggerated national security threat. To the American people, we are lost in the causality logic when the wars are prolonged across many years of military budget cycles, was the budget fueling the war or the war fueling the budget?!
 
As clearly explained by Stockman, the U.S. military budget at the height of Cold War during President Eisenhower’s Administration was $52B (today’s value $370B, 45.5% of Biden’s $813B), a budget he felt adequate for national security. Recalling Eisenhower’s farewell speech, he delivered the warning of the dangers of unchecked power in the military-industrial complex. According to Stockman, Biden’s military budget is 2.2X of Ike’s 1960 budget, 2.0X of Nixon’s in 1972, 2.2X of Carter’s outgoing year 1982 and 1.54X and 1.33X of Reagan’s in 1986 and 1990. The 1990 was supposedly a dropping off point for U.S. foreign engagement, because the Soviet Union was having economic problems and China was raising debt to finance her economic development. The end of Cold War should have changed the trend of military spending. The U.S. was the only superpower in 1990’s and the U.S. military-industry complex was in full control. Why wasn’t the warfare state stopping expanding? Why was our military budget kept on rising?
 
The explanation has to be in the nature of “the complex” that was created in the U.S. First, there is the greed nature alluded to by Stockman. Second, the causality logic between warfare and military budget is inter-looped in complexity. The warfare is a multi-year affair and the budget cycle is an annual event subject to Congressional scrutiny. In a representative democracy, the citizens usually do not track closely on foreign affairs (thus vulnerable to brainwash). Hence, during each year’s budget time, only a few Congressional delegates who would look back on war expenditures and war threats or pending threats to make appropriations on military budget. If there was no war, the budget might get cut, so “the complex” would have to keep the war going, often using the existing money from past budget or employing creative financing (remember selling drugs?) to sustain or create new wars. The complex would often lobby the few key Congressional delegates to pass its desired budget. Perhaps, “the complex” has become “the Congress-military-industrial-intelligence-foreign aid-think tank-NGO-lobbying complex.”
 
Stockman also commented (reference Patrick Lawrence, Casualties of Empire, Consortium News, March 8, 2022) on the fake news created during the current Russia-Ukraine war, such as Russian bombing the maternity ward, then the theater, then the school and the massacre in Bucha town in Kiev killing the civilians with 410 corpses exposed in the Bucha street. The evidences were suspicious (corpses wearing white bands indicating neutral or pro-Russian citizens) and they were denied from UN inspections. The media reporting of the war was full of propaganda designed to paint Zelensky as a hero, Ukrainians were brave and winning, and Russians were committing genocide and war crimes, all for the purpose of prolonging the war passing the U.S. election. This author has written numerous times about the problem of distorted media and suggested that an UN World Media Organization (WMO) should be established to prevent and clean up fake news wars. The consequence of fake war news is that unnecessary wars can be encouraged and triggered and peace negotiation can be sabotaged. This is exactly happening to Ukraine. The media machine has become the evil tool in the causality chain of warfare and military budget. On the one hand, it is used to create and exaggerate the war threat to justify military budget and weapon development and on the other hand it is used to paint and horrify the war results to justify spending and winning cruel warfare.
 
So to American citizens, it is irrelevant to consider whether military budget caused warfare or vice versa, either way we will be falling into the warfare-military budget inter-loop. It is important to understand that our national security today is never worse than Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama eras. (Ukraine not joining the NATO may even enhance our national security.) It is crucial for American citizens to stop “the complex” to keep fueling the threat-warfare-military budget inter-loop. The most critical part perhaps is to break the Congress from “the complex”. Please start by writing to your Congress representatives asking why the U.S. is a warfare state having wars in 99% of her history of independence?! Why can't the U.S. start a peace movement for a change?!

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We all knew there was much more useless stuff and information circulating through media than the internet emails or blogs now a days.  As a researcher engaged in an ‘intelligent search engine- MWsearch’ two decades ago (www.mwsearch.com), I always value 'proactive' search (search engine trying to understand beyond your search words or phrase before searching the databases) using thesaurus, filters and comparisons. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to have found a profound story using Baidu, a Chinese search engine to look for essays on philosophies. The following short story deserves to be retold in English and shared with today's young people.
 
A serious religious young man contemplating to be a monk (priest) went to a famous 'knowledge guru' living in a temple on the top of Huang Shan*(*One of the tallest mountains in Mid-South of China famous for its scenery, sharp peaks, exotic trees and odd shape rocks hidden in the clouds or misty fog depending on the time of day and season) to ask a question that had troubled him, ‘What is the value of my life?’ The guru read the young man’s puzzled face and pondered his question, then he said to him: On this mountain, go find the nicest rock you can carry and bring to the morning market in the village below and sell it, but just raise your two fingers if anyone wants to buy it. Don’t haggle over price and don’t sell it.  Just hear the offers then bring the rock back to see me after you have received some offers. We will perhaps discuss your question.
 
The young man went to the morning market with his rock, finally near the end of the morning, an old lady asked: Young man, are you selling this nice rock, how much? He raised his two fingers. The old lady said, two dollars? The young man shaking his head raised his two fingers again. The old Lady said, twenty dollars? Well, I could use this rock to press tofu (that is how tofu is made), but I won’t pay more than $20 for it.
 
The young man didn’t sell it and brought the rock back to see the guru. The guru said, very well, you shall bring the rock to the city museum tomorrow and sell it again, but don’t haggle, don’t sell just get the highest offer and bring your rock back to see me and we will talk. The puzzled young man did what he was asked to do. He sat in front of the museum to see whether anyone will buy his rock. Lots of people going in and out of the museum and some curiously stopped to look at his rock. Then one curious gentleman asked, are you selling this old rock? How much? The young man raised his two fingers. The gentleman asked, 200 dollars? Shaking his head, the young man raised his two fingers again. Then, the gentleman said, perhaps it is worth $2000, will you sell it to me?
 
The young man did not sell his rock and went back to the guru. The guru said, very well, you got $2000 offer for your rock. I want you to bring your rock to sell it again in front of the famous Mr. Wang’s antique and auction company tomorrow. Do the same thing you did today then I will give the answer to your question when you come back.
 
The young man was wondering why a gentleman would offer him $2000 for a rock he found on the mountain, but he knew the guru’s reputation. He was anxious to get an answer from him. He followed the instruction and went to the city next day. He wore his best cloth and sat by the entrance area of the famous auction house with his rock. Many people came by carriages and cars, but they walked by him without even paying attention to him entering the antique auction company.  Then the young man heard the shouting commotion of the auction but patiently sat there.  After a few hours the auction was over, all people came out, a few with happy face but many with a disappointed face. Then a businessman noticed the young man sitting there with his rock placed over a piece of silk, he asked, this looks like a very old rock, are you selling it? The young man raised his two fingers. The businessman said, $20,000 dollars? The young man just raised his two fingers again. The businessman looked at the young man for a while then said, I should have known better, you mean $200,000 dollars, right? I will buy it if you tell me where and when did you find this old rock. The young man was shocked when he heard the $200,000 dollar offer, but he did not sell it. He wrapped the rock with the silk and rushed back to the guru while the businessman was shouting behind him: don’t go, let’s negotiate….
 
When the young man climbed back up Huang Shan, the mountain with more than ten thousand steps, and told the guru in a gasping voice that he had gotten an offer of $200,000 dollars for his rock, the guru said to him in a stern voice: “Calm down, young man!  The value of your life is just like this rock. It depends on where you place it, how people perceive it and how much you really want it to be!”        
 
This story may sound simple but it indeed contains a profound philosophical meaning. A young man or a young lady may not know the value of his or her life, but if he or she really takes an effort to think and seek an answer, the answer will be revealed by the effort. This story tells everyone that life has many opportunities, one must be patient and must make the effort to find the opportunities to realize the highest value.  Haggling does not bring the highest price.
 
This philosophical story also says anyone or anything has a value, but the true value, like beauty,  is in the eyes of the perceiver. This applies to international relations. America First or American Exceptionalism must be appreciated and perceived by others not by claiming or haggling. The U.S. was indeed perceived as exceptional, a dependable rock, during WW II, in the fifties, sixties ...perhaps even nineties, but the U.S. has changed for the worse unfortunately. The perceivers in the world have changed as well with higher value system. Today, the U.S. is facing a rapidly rising China, eagerly seeking independence Europe, a determined recovering Russia and a diligently striving Asia, South America and Africa, the U.S. must find true value in others' eyes. Does the U.S. really offer a rock of security and peace or chaos and war? Does Democracy offer a $20 dollar utility value, a $2000 museum piece or a $200,000 eccentric collector's worth? The U.S. must understand the perceivers to appreciate its rock or improve its rock to meet the changing perceivers' value system.