The end of Amerocentric Neoliberalism?

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Um... yes it is, actually.

We are one of the leading industrial nations. Not the biggest, but we don't have to be the best at everything just to survive.

I highly doubt that your prediction of currency collapse in the US is accurate. We aren't Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe. Our currency has been pretty stable for a very long time, and it would take much more than a budget deficit to destroy our monetary policy.

You are quite correct. For us (the U.S.) to be it need not be number one. We have to be capable enough of supply ourselves with the goods and services necessary to live in a decent manner. There was a time when the U.S. was not the leading producer and that time has come around to us again. It is the turn of some other nation. Let the Chinese try it for a while. That will teach them a lesson.

Technology maybe, science no. It isn't the fault of those who would do the science either, it is the fault of the those that would STOP the science.

I hope you're correct, but confidence is a fleeting thing. And it is ONLY confidence that holds the greenback at it's value.

You forget how much the US relies on foreign trade, in both directions.
The world as a whole, and more so every day, dislikes the US.

Can the US maintain food production, let alone the production of other goods at it's current population growth combined with the resource depletion it's facing?

The value of the American dollar comes not from confidence, it comes from the fact that American taxes are paid in it and it comes from the attractiveness of the American market, from its productive capacities and its aggregate demand. If U.S. governments decide to decimate that market in the name of "fiscal responsibility" then the dollar will suffer accordingly. Also, if taxes are lowered too much that will reduce the demand for currency.

We are the world's leading technological and scientific powerhouse. Also, on a more basic level, we are the world's single largest food producer. Fantasies about America's collapse will remain just that. Without us, the rest of the world would starve.

Yes, the high debt levels are likely to be a problem. How big of one is hard to tell. It is possible that we will experience a slow decline and, twenty years from now, we might not be able to unilaterally dictate the terms of international arrangements anymore. That's OK.

... it is overwhelmingly apparent that massive change is coming in the global economy.

Take for instance the recent attack on American economic policies by China’s Premier Wen Jiabao. Wen took sharp aim at Washington, saying that the U.S. is failing to rebuild its own economy and to maintain the value of the dollar. China, whose foreign reserves exceeded $2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, held nearly $900 billion of those reserves in dollar-denominated U.S. government Treasury Bills. What Beijing fears is that the U.S. is engaged in policies that will sharply reduce the value of the dollar and that this will not only slash the value of the Treasury Bills China holds, it will close off much of the U.S. market to Chinese exports.

Last year, Chinese officials speculated that the epoch in which the U.S. dollar serves as the world’s reserve currency is coming to an end.

The current warnings from the Chinese government could force up interest rates on U.S. Treasury Bills and that would worsen the already perilous fiscal crisis in which the U.S. government finds itself.

...

After the crash, the next global economy will centre less on the United States, much more on Asia, with more important roles for Europe and Latin America. The proportion of global economic output accounted for by the United States has been declining for over sixty years, from about fifty per cent right after the Second World War to about twenty per cent today. As the U.S. share of global output drops to the range of fifteen per cent, qualitative changes in the role of the United States in the world will make themselves felt.

Even though the U.S. proportion of global output has steadily fallen, the United States has retained its crucial economic leverage up until now. The American twenty per cent up until the crash remained the critical twenty per cent and the United States retained its position at the centre of the global system in its ability to determine outcomes to a much greater extent than any other economic power. For crucial rising economic powers, most notably China, the American market was essential to increasing economic output and economic development at home. That’s changing, and will be an important aspect of the new global economy.

For the past six decades, an essential aspect of its role as the global economic hegemonic power has been to open its domestic market as the market of last resort to most of the countries of the world. As well, the United States as served as the site of last resort for investments from other countries. Americans have been the world’s crucial spenders and they have accommodated the world’s savers. All of this has been enormously beneficial, of course, to Americans who have been enabled to live beyond their means.

The place to start this look at the wrenching changes that are coming to the global economy is with China, the country that could ultimately stand to gain the most from the changes in the long term. In the short to middle term, however, China’s way of dealing with the rest of the world is being subjected to a wrenching transformation.

For China, the pattern of trade and capital flows with the United States will be fundamentally altered. In recent years, China has been running up enormous trade surpluses with the United States. Had China allowed the exchange rate of the yuan to float against other currencies, principally the U.S. dollar, the surpluses would have driven up the value of the yuan which would have braked the further rise of the exports. Instead China decided to keep the yuan and the dollar closely aligned. To prevent the yuan from soaring against the dollar, China had to allow dollars to flood in so that the Chinese accumulated an ever more enormous cache of dollars. This was the way China ended up holding vast sums in U.S. Treasury Bills, bonds with a very low rate of return.

...


The leadership of the Communist Party is acutely aware that presiding over a society that is divided into so many disparate elements, from the highly educated professionals and members of the business class to those who eke out a bare living on the land is fraught with the risk of political upheaval, even social revolution. Those directing the Chinese state have devised a system of state capitalism that allows for buccaneer style capitalism in leading sectors of the economy along with a planning apparatus that feeds migrant workers into the workplace and uses the incomes they earn to help lift the peasantry out of poverty. The availability of the vast American market for Chinese exports has been central to the operation of this system. Chinese capitalists and the Chinese state found it more profitable and more manageable to use the American market to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than to make the more difficult choice of developing their own vast internal market. In following the path to industrialization by holding down the value of their currency and exporting to the U.S., China was following in the footsteps of West Germany and Japan, countries that took the same course with great success during the post-war decades.

...
While the U.S. market for Chinese products is bound to be less bountiful than in the past, other markets can partially fill the void. The European market is likely to be one of those. The greatest potential, however, lies with India, the other Asian giant that is swiftly becoming a global economic power. Commercial relations between China and India have grown enormously, and will continue to grow over the coming decades. The fit between the giants is one in which China plays the role of industrial producer to India’s role as a high-tech powerhouse. Recently, China has increased its exports to India in sectors such as capital goods, including power plants and other infrastructure equipment. With these exports, rather than relying on products designed elsewhere as is the case for most of the Chinese exports to the United States, the Chinese designed and developed the capital goods sold to India and retain much of the value added from these sales.

I don't think Laxer has argued that America will outright "collapse" like Rome, but rather fade more ceremoniously as the British Empire did.

That is a possibility. However, remember that Britain is still one of the preeminent world powers, and I would not anticipate America's decline going as far as Britain's did simply because we are a much larger nation with a broader base of natural and other resources. We may no longer be the sole, dominant superpower, but we will almost certainly be in the top 3-5 most influential forces in international policy, and we will probably still be militarily the strongest nation (not that military might is relevant in the 21st century).

How will the US eliminate or reduce the structural deficit without contracting the military?

You do realize that even if the US cut the military budget in half, it would still be larger than the next 5 nations on the list combined, don't you?

How will the US eliminate or reduce the structural deficit without contracting the military?

American neoliberalism is like a vampire that won't die. It seems to always come out of its grave at night to suck more blood despite the mountains of corpses it leaves in its wake.

We are the world's leading technological and scientific powerhouse. Also, on a more basic level, we are the world's single largest food producer. Fantasies about America's collapse will remain just that. Without us, the rest of the world would starve.

Everything he said was true. And we are not the production powerhouse that we used to be. A shift from high capital production to services has taken place. In a real sense, our economy has gone soft.