His intent is not to frighten readers,
but help them assess the risks and dangers that exist from following
the policies America is currently pursuing. He says, “We
need to hear the real facts and the plain truth even if it hurts.”
Studdert lists ten dangers including
the triple threat to our global economic dominance posed by China,
India and Russia; the time bomb of American debt; our unfunded
entitlement programs; radical Islam and terrorism; federal government
stupidity; the bursting of the housing bubble; our unquenchable
thirst for oil; immigration insanity; pandemic plagues; and America’s
failing infrastructure.
Some of these are issues we assume
we see, but Studdert connects the dots for readers in a way designed
to help us pull our heads out of the sand.
Meridian Magazine recently
interviewed Stephen Studdert about the issues he discusses in
his book.
Meridian Magazine: You indicate right now that
you are very worried about America. Why?
Studdert: I told
my wife when I first went to the White House when I was 26-years
old, I’ve been exposed to too much information that is just
frightening. Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t known it.
However, as I look at the issues
facing America, I have never seen a more potentially dangerous
time since the Civil War, and what worries me most is that if
two or three of these possible dangers hit simultaneously, our
ability to respond to is very limited. To me a perfect example
right now is that we have a housing/credit crunch with the burst
of the housing bubble and foreclosures are already at a historical
high. Theoretically to avoid a recession, the government passes
a so-called stimulus 160 billion refund to the taxpayers, but
it is a refund of taxes never yet collected, so in reality it’s
160 billion more debt on the backs of the American public.
Meridian Magazine:
Tell us about the economic threat facing America.
Studdert: For over
a century, the United States has been the economic powerhouse
of the world. But not much longer. We are not paying enough attention
to the triple threat of China, India and Russia that are emerging
as global economic powers in their own right.
China is a danger to us in that China,
with its 3 billion new capitalists, is consuming an increasing
amount of global resources, which is driving the cost and availability
up for our country. China today has about a million cars. In 15
years it is estimated they will have 160 million cars. Where’s
the fuel for those cars going to come from?
India has a billion people, they are surprisingly well educated,
and they speak English and so the cost of labor there is a fraction
of what it is here. We’re going to see more and more jobs
migrate from the United States to India.
Russia’s geopolitical objectives
are very counter to ours, and Russia has enormous gas and oil
reserves, which are going to make it a new and dangerous power
in the world. Each of those three countries has global objectives
that do not necessarily align with the objectives of the United
States. They are countries with newfound wealth and we are a country
of enormous debt.
Meridian Magazine:
Talk about the U.S. debt. Is it something to be concerned about
or will increased productivity substantially lower it?
Studdert: Our debt
is a ticking time bomb. Last year, for example, we Americans,
as consumers, spent $20 for every $19 we made. One doesn’t
have to be a Ph.D economist to figure out we can’t sustain
that for very long. At all levels, the government, corporate and
personal level, we have been spending money we don’t have,
by financing debt.
Who is the largest buyer of our public debt? China. I find the
behavior of China curious when looked at from an American perspective,
but when looked at from a Chinese perspective, which is thousands
of years in the making, it looks very different. They are on a
course to restore themselves to what they see as a rightful position
of world dominance. We’re going to fund that. We are in
the process of indirectly funding it.
David Walker, the comptroller general,
says that if the federal government were a private business, it
would be declared bankrupt. He also says that if we don’t
deal with it now, the only choice in a handful of years will be
to cut the federal budget by half or double taxes. Those are draconian
measures that would be enormously disruptive to our economy, but
he says we have no choice.
I dedicated the book to my children
and grandchildren with an apology for the mess we are leaving
them. Our children will be the first generation of Americans to
enjoy a lesser quality of life because of what we have done.
Meridian Magazine:
Most Americans are not aware of the intricacies of our
national debt. Why don’t the politicians do anything about
it?
It is interesting if you watch our
electoral behavior, we tend to ask our elected officials what’s
in it for me? Federal program after federal program is being funded
so that we the voters will keep electing them. It’s self-serving,
reckless and ultimately very destructive.
We see politics at its self-serving
worst. If we look at the true federal government debt, and we
say its 9 trillion dollars, that ignores all of the unfunded federal
obligations and entitlement programs, which when you add them
together, it is about 77 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billion,
and a billion is a thousand million. Think about that.
It troubles me that so many of our
public officials at every level — federal, state, and local
— are more concerned with their own political preservation
than they are the public good. My observation is that in Washington
today, the long-term aggregate impact is never assessed. They
only look at the immediately, short-term political benefit.
We as citizens look to the government
to fund all kinds of things, and the amount of money spent and
the influence of special interest groups on public officials is
at an unprecedented level. Elected officials who used to be beholden
to the public are now so much more beholden to the various special
interest groups who fund their re-election campaigns that the
whole process has become very distasteful.
Meridian Magazine:
You mention that many Americans are losing their pensions
because businesses have made promises they can’t fulfill.
Studdert: I talk
in the book about the crisis in American pensions. I’m astounded
as I talk to people how absolutely uninformed they are on that
subject and yet every day that is an issue that worsens. Many
pension funds are broke, too. For example, the city of Vacaville,
California, is filing bankruptcy, because of their inability to
pay police and fire pension obligations. Kentucky has a multi-billion
dollar shortfall for state employees’ pensions. With 78
million baby boomers starting this year to retire, that is a problem
that is going to accelerate and worsen.
Meridian Magazine:
We are all feeling a new crunch at the pump as gasoline
prices continue to climb.
Studdert: We are
in a very fragile position regarding oil.
Today we’re an oil dependent
nation and our five biggest oil providers are Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela. We have to be insane to have handed
our security to those countries. They are not known for long-term
stability or for true friendship to the United States.
Look at Nigeria, which has as corrupt
a government as there is in the world and is primarily a Muslim
country. Iran’s leader is a madman who says Israel should
be obliterated from the face of the earth and refers to America
as the Great Satan. Saudi Arabia has spent billions over the last
twenty years building schools that teach their Wahhabi beliefs
and Wahhabism teaches that America should be destroyed.
Meanwhile, we prohibit drilling ANWR
in Alaska and prohibit drilling off the coast of Florida, and
yet Cuba is drilling 40 miles off the coast of Florida —
go figure. I appreciate being sensitive to the environment, which
is part of the covenant we as members of the Church mean when
we work to be good stewards, but it also means being a wise steward,
and we haven’t been very wise of yet.
Meridian Magazine: Are
the mortgage failures included in your list of dangerous issues?
Studdert: Most of
those are adjustable rate mortgages where the rate resets and
the homeowners haven’t the ability to pay the higher price.
The market has dropped so much that the owner owes more on the
home than it is worth.
People wonder if the housing market
will rebound. I am of the opinion that the current problem is
not temporary, and we will see it continue to worsen and spread
to multiple other fronts as we’ve seen it spread to the
bond insurance companies.
Meridian Magazine:
Tell us about your concern about terrorist attacks.
Studdert: There
are approximately 1 billion Muslim adherents in the world. A small
percentage of them, 10% or so, could be categorized as extremists.
That is 100 million people who would like to see the United States
destroyed because of the values we’ve adopted that they
find offensive. I attend on an occasional basis, meetings with
those in the intelligence and national security community. They
are doing a masterful job of preventing terror attack. People
in these agencies are working to the point of exhaustion to protect
this country. They need our praise. They need our respect and
they deserve it, but they all speak in terms of not if, but when.
They speak in terms of the inevitability of a terrorist attack
on this country, here at home, be it nuclear, chemical, biological
or other kinds of terror.
If the anti-American terror groups
don’t have access to nuclear weaponry it is only a question
of time when you look at North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.
Just in recent days as we were talking
about the terror threat to the United States and what our government
has gratefully prevented, a senior official said to me, if the
public had any idea what we’ve already prevented, it would
scare them to death.
Meridian Magazine:
Of all the issues you mention as possible terrorist problems for
America, what worries you the most and could cause the most devastation?
Studdert: I suppose
the one that concerns me the most would be a terrorist attack
where the terrorists used an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse, which
we know exists for example in Russia. If one of those were detonated
over the continental US at 30 miles up, it would cripple this
country instantly in every single measure. What an EMP does is
destroy electronics, so instantly power plants, the starter on
your car, computer systems, refrigerators — all would be
destroyed and the country would collapse. Instantly there wouldn’t
be a vehicle in this country that has an electric starter that
would run. What would we do for food tomorrow if we haven’t
stored it? That is the one that frightens me most. The other problems
are sneaking up on us one day at a time. Hopefully, our national
defenses could prevent some of the other terrorist possibilities,
but we are not equipped to prevent an EMP. The only way we could
stop that is through good intelligence. If one explodes, in a
matter of milliseconds the damage is done.
Meridian Magazine:
Why don’t Americans realize the dangers that we are in?
Studdert: As I watch
the so-called news reporting today, the media are not reporting
the hard news of fiscal issues or public policy as much as they
are such ridiculous issues as steroid use by major league baseball
players. The second thing to quote Elder Maxwell is that we’re
too often bogged down in the thick of thin things. Because so
many of these problems are seemingly over the horizon, we’re
busy managing our own lives on a daily basis instead of paying
attention to the bigger picture.
What happened at 9/11 came a as complete
surprise to all of us. As tragic as it was, it was limited just
to one city. We could learn from that or from Katrina how without
warning, devastating things can occur. What would happen if China
— who is the largest holder of U.S. treasury debt —
were to say, “We’re not going to hold this anymore.
Or we’re going to sell all of these debts at a discounted
price. It would have an emormous destabilizing force on our country
and we would not have even seen it coming.
Meridian Magazine:
What can any of us do about this personally? It all seems a bit
overwhelming.
Studdert: We ought
to feel an urgency, but not a panic. It is interesting, if we
listen to the words of President. Hinckley and others of the General
Authorities over the past years, how many times have they kindly,
but firmly said to us, get your houses in order? And while you
and I can’t on our own fix the nation, we can certainly
take care of our lives and our own houses and our own families.
We have to be serious about getting
out of debt individually and as families. We ought to be serious
about not taking on more debt. We ought to be serious about living
within our means. We ought to be serious about higher education
for the best employment we can qualify for, and we ought to be
serious about things like food storage and family preparation.
I had a son who worked in a car dealership
in a community that was overwhelmingly LDS. Our son observed that
an extraordinary number of people bought cars that were bigger
and more costly than they could possibly afford, but because financing
was so readily available, they splurged. We don’t need that
big house. We don’t need that SUV. We need to be safe and
secure first. The savings rate in the U.S. is a negative number.
In China the average person saves 30%. Just that number alone
speaks volumes about where our two countries are going.
It is interesting the brethren have
told us for decades that our personal food storage ought to include
wheat and the scriptures talk about wheat for man. Last week wheat
futures closed at $22 per bushel and wheat supplies in the U.S.
are at an all-time low. If you talk about a perfect storm for
trouble, there it is.
Elder Oaks gave a talk about good,
better, best and said we need to make choices between good, better
and best. We need to make our lives more simplified and less harried,
so we can focus on weightier matters without all the bombarding
confusions of the world.
Meridian Magazine:
Beyond helping our own families, what can we do for the future
of America?
Studdert: I love
the United States of America, and I am deeply concerned about
the future. Unfortunately today we’re more concerned with
political correctness than we are political courage. I wish we
could change the definition of P.C. to be political courage. To
make political decisions that are right for the country may mean
the decisions are unpopular, and most politicians today don’t
want to make unpopular decisions.
In addition, today there is a poison
of politics. The personal costs of running for public office and
serving in public office are very dear because that vitriolic
tone has made the notion of being involved in public service less
appealing to more and more people. One example comes to mind during
the administration of the former George Bush when the number two
position at the state department became available. The position
was quietly offered to 59 people before someone would accept the
appointment because of the cost, the stress, the drain and the
innuendo and the attack. Not one of those 59 wanted to expose
themselves to that.
I’m of the view that America
was created, as the founders said, under the hand of providence
and it had and has divine purposes. For 200-plus years, America
has been the light of the world and the envy and desire of most
of the world. You go to any country in the world, and there are
lines at the U.S. embassy to get visas to come here. There are
not lines at other embassies, but because of our reckless spending
and self-serving public policy we are dooming ourselves
I for years I’ve pondered a
phrase in my patriarchal blessing about being my brother’s
keeper. I think that includes to alert your brethren to danger
and for me that was a driving force in writing this book. The
second driving force is my love of the United States of America
because it is still the best system in the world.
Great civilizations in history have
failed when they didn’t follow the words of the Lord and
the words of the prophet, and I pray such is not the course we’re
going to choose.
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