The global economic crisis has revealed the folly of large U.S. budget and trade deficits, as well as of the strong dollar that makes them possible. If it is serious about recovery, the United States must balance the budget, stimulate private saving, and embrace a declining dollar.
Comments
In partial response to Prof. Wietzer
This is just a brief response on the letter to the editor by Prof. Wietzer. I wished to point out a flaw in his critique, found in the last paragraph. He states, and I quote,
'He cites the example of the Netherlands (which formally legalized prostitution in 2000) as evidence that legalization is a failure, but he seems to contradict himself when he writes that "only the Netherlands has a better record than the United States of prosecuting those involved with the slave trade." Even the State Department, in its Trafficking in Persons Report for 2005, observed that there has been a "decrease in trafficking in the legal sector' in the Netherlands."
In these few sentences, he incorrectly implies a corelation between prosecution of those involved in the slave trade and success of legalizing prostitution. To clarify, he concludes that since the Netherlands has the best record for prosecuting offenders, then legalization is not a failure. The implied corelation, however, has no foundation. It may be that the prosecution record in the Netherland (most likely ranked by number of prosecutions) supports the failure of legalization, rather than contradicts it. If the Netherlands, with it's tiny population relative to the United States has MORE prosecutions on record, then it seems to me that offenders must still be at work in vast numbers in the Netherlands. Kapstien made no contradiction in his original essay; rather, the professor of sociology at the highly ranked George Washington University needs to take a basic logic class.