A mass salvo of a gazillion nuclear tipped missiles targeting every square inch of US territory including foreign bases and embassies.

 

Care to refine the question?

Just a thought ......

If you were to play the role of an enemy of the US, what should be carried out in order to either undermine or eventually destroy the US?

Right now, the surest strategy would be to leave everything as it is and not get in the way of the US' self destruction.

 

However, I sense that the premise of your question assumes that the US is sustaining itself.

 

There was a TV program which touched on biological warfare issues and more specifically on the work of a Soviet biological warfare expert.

 

IIRC, he had an idea for genetically modified virus. IIRC, the virus would have had encoding which would have had its host cell manufacturing human muscle tissue protein. I believe the intent here was to provoke an immune system response against human muscle tissue.

 

The virus, evidently would have been a relatively mild acting flu virus. People would come down with a mild case of the flu which would go away without causing any noticeable problems. Then, long enough afterward to allow the trail to get cold, the people who had contracted the flu would come down with a debilitating auto-immune disorder. They could be kept alive but would need much medical intervention.

 

One can imagine that were a large part of the adult population to be affected this way, the economic implact could be crippling. A large part of the population would be unable to work, unable to support themselves and would need expensive care. There would be practically no economic sector that would not be seriously affected.

 

Tax revenue would fall off. Government would be financially stressed. The defense establishment could potentially be weakened.

 

The nation's leaders would have to come up with a strategy to deal with the problem of course.

 

Would euthanasia be considered as a cost saving measure? Some people who would have their jobs/benefits threatened might insist on it.

 

How about guest workers to make up the shortage in workers/tax payers? A very large influx of foreigners could lead to social instability. There could be social conflict.

 

 

Aren't they doing exactly that right now?

 

1. Dismentle US industry.

2. Destroy the value of US dollar.

3. Destroy US society by demoralization of social values.

4. Destroy the Fourth Estate and make them the Fifth Column.

5. Balkanize the population alone racial and linguistic lines.

6. etc etc

 

The real question should be asking is how to rebuild the US after the irreparable damage by the enemies of freedom.

 

 

I agree.

This is the far more interesting albeit challenging problem.

 

A Fox News Sunday interview with three CEOs yielded some interesting suggestions for economic improvement. Fred Smith of FedEx, IIRC, mentioned a need to lower the business tax on corporations. He also mentioned that the financial sector enjoys a preponderance of tax breaks whereas similar tax breaks for manufacturing would do much more to increase employment.

 

I believe we need to change how we make education available to the majority of people. That government at one level or another controls to a significant degree education from preschool to a post graduate level leads to an inculcation of statist values into the minds of the citizenry.

 

It is quite apparent that the bulk of the educational establishment, consisting to a large extent government employees, is a key constituency of statist politicians and as a practical matter, the Democratic Party.

 

Giving tuition money to parents of school children in order to enable those parents to place their children in private schools might be a way to highly privatize K thru 12 education and preferably university education. Privatizing education would probably allow for a lot less pro-statist bias in school instruction.

 

Government entitlements are a problem. They influence people to believe they are entitled to the fruit of someone else's labor. They undermine the sanctity of private property. They corrupt the morals of society.

 

As a general observation, the bigger government gets, the more people on a government payroll there are. Because of our predisposition to an entitlement mentality, government employees naturally see themselves as entitled to their jobs and of course constitute an important statist constituency. So, our politicians will naturally have to cater to this constituency which has a vested interest in  the growth of government and in the increase of a a tax burden on people in the private sector who, after all, pay for government.

 

In my state, the recently elected governor has shown more concern for the employment secuity of state government employees than for the employment security of people in the private sector where the amount of available jobs is adversely affected by the burden of the state's ever increasing level of taxation.

 

(The funny thing is that if state government could greatly reduce its tax rates and spending footprint. the result would probably be that industry would moving here and revenue would therefore go up.)

 

We have to find a way to reverse runaway government growth driven by government employee vested interests (leaders who aren't cowards).

 

We will also have to find better ways to accomplish the more worthwhile functions among our present government entitlements in the private sector.

 

This a little of what I think we need to do.

 

 

 

I think the US Dollar is the least of our concerns for now ...

 

1.   China and Japan have been the two largest foreign holders of US Federal Government obligations.  However, it would be rather difficult to dump US Treasury bonds and notes as neither one of them have enough internal consumer economies in place of the US consumer economy.

 

2.  How about gong back to the gold standard?  Not likely to happen.  The problem with 'hard money' is that it is at its worst when facing deflationary scenarios.  If anything, deflationary scenario can be lot more painful than inflationary scenario.  Deflation:  The relative value of the money becomes greater than those of the other assets.  The more money become scarce, therefore more valuable, relative to the other assets, the more folks will hold onto their money.  Downward spiral.  No government is going to accept this option.

 

3.  Even at the floating currency exchange game:  While the proponents of the Euro have been trying to present themselves as the alternative to the USD hegemony, things have not quite turned out the way they have imagined.  (My criticism towards the Euro:  It would have worked out well, as long as it was not subjected to overextension.  The Euro regime should have stayed within its core members -- Germany, the Low Countries, France, Austria, and a few more others, but definitely not upon the PIGS countries!  The underlying problem within the EU:  The core Euro -- lower relative inflation and thus could use 'stronger' currency, but peripheral Euro -- higher inflation and also developing, thus actually need 'weaker' currency.)

But if people do not hold on to their money much more tightly, what then?

 

A likely problem in deflation would be interest rates on loans. But just as we have the ARM as an adaptation to inflation, why not extend it to deflation? A reduced positive interest or a negative interest on loans might keep many industries going.

Take 2008 federal spending levels and increase them by 23% = 90% gdp/debt = socialism

Statistics indicate that it's all downhill from there to the bloodshed.