“Hey big spender, spend a little time with me.” It is not certain that Cy Coleman’s and Dorothy Fields’ lyrics from “Sweet Charity” were used by Barack Obama when he invited British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to visit him next week, but it is possible. After all, both men believe that the way out of this recession is to borrow and borrow and spend and spend; and both are addicted to an expanded role for the state in the affairs of their citizens.
The prime minister will be meeting with a president who has decided on the most radical recasting of America’s priorities since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, or at least since Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society programs in 1965, indeed, “the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a US president”, according to columnist Charles Krauthammer. This should be of interest not only to Americans, but to the rest of the world, which cannot but be affected by a major change in the structure of the U.S. economy.
