THE "GREAT POWER" MEME SEEMS TO BE SPREADING

And I'm concerned that the wingnuts & the Baggers will prefer a bloated military to "butter." This is from the Feb. 7th edition of Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: And, Dr. Greenspan, Larry Summers, one of the president's top economics advisers, has said in the past--he's asked a very provocative question, which is, how long can the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?

MR. GREENSPAN: Not indefinitely, because there's no doubt that if the United States continues down the road that Hank has been correctly identifying, we're going to find that our ability to borrow is going to get restrained because, throughout our history, we have always maintained a capital cushion, a cushion between our borrowing capacity on the one hand and the level of debt on the other. That is beginning to shrink. And if we get to the point where we're having difficulty selling our security--our Treasury issues, then interest rates begin to move and our ability to move internationally, to essentially be the major currency, the major economy, the major economic power in the world is significantly diminished. History tells us that great powers, when they've gotten into very significant fiscal problems, have ceased to be great powers.