.and we inspected his brakes for free. -free is good. -free is very good. [ male announcer ] now get 50% off brake pads and shoes at meineke. is america s deficit problem so bad? well, not any more at least, not for the next decade. the congressional budget predicts, they did it on tuesday, that in 2015 the deficit will be only 2.1% of gdp, that s down from 4% this year, 7% last year and a high of 10% in 2009. so, should we celebrate? joining me are glenn hubbard, the dean of the columbia business school chief economic adviser to the romney campaign and also the co-author of a fascinating new book balance the economics of great powers from ancient rome to modern america. and zanny minton beddoes the economic analysis of the economist.
rate has to be on the remaining. that s true. and the more power it gives to the irs. somebody has to determine who is exempt and who s not. okay. what is the big point relating to all this that we should learn from your book? well, two points in the book. one, people have a declinist view of the united states and all that s going on and our view in the book, we don t think the u.s. is in decline. but we also believe, though, that the fiscal policy problems the country faces really have that potential and change rules of fiscal policy. it s very hard to see our political process really coming to grips. democracies in the united states or europe impose short-term pain for long-term gain? that s what glenn is talking about. i think they can when they are forced to and when something precipitates action. i basically agree with your broad analysis, but i worry that you have too much faith perhaps in rules for achieving that.
card. they didn t send in any aid or development. and they ve got the largest reserve in the world. they bought lithium and they re not building a road network and railway network to extract it. any foreign power in its early days, if any foreign power manages afghanistan, it might be the chinese and they ll do it by doing business with them. pleasure to have you on. terrific book. thank you. google s eric schmidt on the future of technology. fascinating tour. to eat. then rest. to fuel the metabolic cycle they were born to have, purina one created new healthy metabolism wet and dry. with purina one and the right activity, we re turning feeding into a true nature experience.
and he s being brought to justice. brought down by the tribe and today they make up the taliban. so, in many ways what we have is a replay of existing tribal rivalries. slightly different flags. karzai seems attentive to this issue. he denounces the west every third week, precisely because he s trying to make sure people don t think he s he is a more cultured man than people make out. he read this book when it was published in india within a week and i got called to kabul and i spent 90 minutes with him. i am not like any of the other players ignorantly as we all are. he is terrified that he will be remembered, which is why he makes these outrageous statements. soldiers are dying in helmand and then he says, well, i m going to join the taliban and he
invade iraq, you can run off with the oil remnants. you invade afghanistan, you just pull money in. a huge economic hole in the budget and the kind of low-level insurgency which afghans so brilliant at. just a slow attrition of foreign forces and one throws up their hands and says, well, it s just not worth it. in the middle of it, hamid karzai, the man we backed for president. one thing i noticed in your book, the man who the british put in place, their karzai, if you will, was so reviled within the country as a kind of foreign puppet that for decades and decades and for centuries in 2001 you would hear afghans say, make sure, you are not a western puppet who has no support domestically. in a sense, the main reason for writing this book is that president karzai, amazingly, is the chief of the same tribe. in other words, the west has put the same guy on twice.