What will happen to you?
848
“Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to
repeat it”—This cliché, a favorite of history teachers, con-
tains some truth. The book you are reading, for example,
provides some solid guidance: Governments that ignore
the wishes of the people probably won’t long endure;
wars are easier to start than to stop; and investments
that seem to be “too good to be true” probably are. But
apart from such common-sense observations, history pro-
vides few clues about the future.
The first decade of the twenty-first century provesthis point emphatically. In 2000 Americans were
mostly optimistic, and for good reason. After the dis-
solution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States
had no significant enemies. A new era of peace was
dawning. Successive presidents reduced the nation’s
armed forces by nearly a million men and women;
defense spending (as a proportion of the GNP) was
nearly cut in half. Three decades of deficits had come
to an end: In 2000 the U.S. Treasury operated at a
$250 billion surplus. The Congressional Budget
Office projected a $4 trillionfederal surplus for the
coming decade.