Calleo examines America’s rapidly growing deficits – both fiscal and external. With a deft combination of historical, political, and economic analysis, the book examines America’s budgetary and tax patterns in search of the root causes of the deficits – how they are related and how they impact on the US and on the rest of the world. He finds the patterns based more on political power than on economic logic and does not believe they are sustainable indefinitely. Restoring the US and the world to balance calls for a drastic reconsideration of geopolitical roles between the US and the rest of the world. The Soviet collapse provides this opportunity.
‘Calleo has a clearheaded view of the deficit’s cause: It was not so much tax cuts as more spending for defense, health care, interest on the debt, and deposit insurance… [a] satisfying view of what really happened in the ‘80s.’
– Howard Gleckman, Business Week, May 4, 1992
‘For just the same reasons that so many Americans now look back in dismay on the economic developments of the 1980s – sluggish growth in productivity, stagnating incomes, widening inequalities, loss of competitiveness in major industries – Professor Calleo argues that the policies of the last decade have weakened America’s ability to act positively in world affairs.’
– Benjamin Friedman, The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1992