In his 2004 book “Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire,” the British historian Niall Ferguson offered an interesting premise for what might ultimately bring about the decline of the United States. Rather than being prompted by external phenomena, Ferguson wrote, decline might come from domestic financial dynamics, not least a ballooning fiscal crisis resulting from the American tendency to consume much and save little. The US, he warned, faced an impending social security crisis because Americans were living longer and the fiscal system was inadequate to pay for future generations. The self-defeating ways to deal with this reality, he continued, were to engage in massive increases in income and payroll taxes, to slash social security benefits by equally dramatic amounts, or to cut discretionary spending to zero. Whether the massive debt incurred by the US government to absorb the repercussions of the financial shock of 2008 will accelerate this
