Never believe anything originating from BILD. That "newspaper" is a well known scam. Exceptionally dumb entertainment for morons. They have zero credibility in Germany.
Try looking beyond your own back yard for a minute. The concept of countries is outdated, as this whole crisis shows. We are all interconnected. The only reason these socialist states can exist is because the US has assumed the role of being the cops for the entire free world. So we are essentially paying for these social systems, anyway, whether we adopt one in the US or not. The socialist Western countries can live this way because they can spend all their tax revenues on butter, not guns. It would be nice if someone else would do the police work for a change. Maybe the Chinese will take up the sword and we can eat butter which we can pay for by selling sophisticated weapons systems and advanced artificial limbs to China....
That is exactly one of the big issues in the US we spend so much protecting the world. Japan is a great example, they need no military we provide it for them at our expense.
Empires don't protect the world, they protect their interests. And that's why we have the world's reserve currency. There was basically a quid pro quo after WWII. Buy our debt, we will protect you. This covered the "grand area" of Western Europe and Japan. The American way of life is dependent on the reserve currency. And the world, to a large extent, has financed the US Military by buying our debt. This benefitted us. Our consumption was the primary driver of the world economy. That's why we had to deficit spend - because we have the reserve currency. But deficits, of course, have limits. There will come a day when the system can no longer sustain itself. That is, we can no longer maintain a current account deficit, but, at the same time, a current account surplus would throw us in recession. This is Triffin's Dilemma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma The US consumes more resources on a per capita level than any other country - no one comes close. If the US were to stop "being the world's police" as many people put it, the consequences would be devastating on the economy. We're talking about a huge correction. However, the point may be moot now. We already reached peak debt, I think.
with floating currencies - and digital dollars how does being the reserve currency benefit the u.s. way of life. In my opinion it undermines us - because it makes supervision and analysis of the feds inflation more speculative.
Why? The military provides two types of jobs/industries in the US: 1--The defense industry. There is no reason why that would have to come to an end. We sell many weapons to others now; we can just as well sell all or most of them to others. 2--A sort of parallel welfare system that provides jobs to young people with little education and few prospects. People who want to sign up for the military can still do so, but they may be compensated like mercenaries, by some other state or entity. There is no reason this has to end either, as long as the US government propaganda machine continues to present these types of activities as necessary and patriotic.