Book: After America by Mark Steyn

America Alone: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn. Regnery Books. 2011

Your Sneak Preview of Mark Steyn's New Book is Waiting for You

Mark Steyn, author of the New York Times bestseller America Alone, is back with his funniest and most brilliant book yet: After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

Taking on our hopeychangey president's disastrous plan for our nation, After America reveals exactly what a post-American world could look like if we don't change our ways soon.

After America isn't available until August 8th, but as a valued Regnery reader, we're offering you this exclusive excerpt now. For a sample of Steyn's wickedly clever and devastatingly funny new book, read on....

From After America

It was the worst of times, it was the not quite so worst of times. The predecessor to this book was called America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, and, given the title, you may be tempted to respond, "C'mon, man. You told us last time it was the end of the world. Well, where the hell is it? I want my money back. Instead, you come breezing in with this season’s Armageddonouttahere routine. It’s like Barbra Streisand farewell tours—there’ll be another along next summer."

Well, now: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It was about the impending collapse of all of the western world except America. The good news is that the end of the rest of the West is still on schedule. The bad news is that America shows alarming signs of embracing the same fate, and then some.

Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check.

But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program but supersized. Heigh-ho.

It starts with the money. In "The Run Upon the Bankers" (1720), Jonathan Swift wrote:

A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
’Tis like the writing on the wall.

A lot of writing on the wall these days. Who has the bonds of a "developed world" developed to the point that it’s institutionally conditioned to living beyond its means? Foreigners with money. So who’s available and flush enough? The Chinese Politburo; Saudi sheikhs lubricated with oil but with lavish worldwide ideological proselytizing to fund; Russian "businessmen."....These are not the fellows one might choose to have one’s bonds, never mind one’s soul, but there aren’t a lot of other options.

* * *

In 2010, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), described current U.S. deficits as "unsustainable." On that everyone’s agreed. So let’s make them even more so!

On assuming office, President Obama assured us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible wastrel of a predecessor had taken the federal budget on an eight-year joyride. So the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor could get things under control was to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called "Ludicrous Speed." Let’s head for the washed-out bridge, but at Obamacrous Speed!

The Spendballs plans of the Obama administration took the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008 and doubled it, all the way to 2020. "We’ve got a big hole that we’re digging ourselves out of," the president declared in 2011. Usually, when you’re in a hole, it’s a good idea to stop digging. But, seemingly, to get out of the Bush hole, we needed to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of the president’s economics czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses.

By 2020, the actual hole will be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. That’s crazy. Obama’s solution was to attempt to crank it up to 25 to 30 percent as a permanent feature of life. That’s load up the suicide-bomber underpants and pass me the matches.

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