Date: 2025-07-04 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028491
CANADA
FOR THE USA ... THIS IS PAYBACK TIME!
Canada is fine. Trump and the United States are not!
FOR THE USA ... THIS IS PAYBACK TIME!
Canada is fine. Trump and the United States are not!
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The problem for Americans is going to be that a world that has no love for Trump and will 'push back' against most everything that Trump tries to do. This will end up being really bad for the general population of the USA.
I grew up in the UK. I was 5 to 25 years old in the two decades post WWII ... 1945 to 1965
During that time, though the UK and the 'allies' had won the war, the British had consumed a huge amount of its historic wealth. Most of the gold that had once resided in the Bank of England in London was now located in Fort Knox in the United States in payment of Britain's war debts to the United States.
During those early postwar years Britain's economy was in tatters. The country's infrastructure had received little or no maintenance during the five war years and the country's finances were also under severe stress because of 'lend-lease' related payments to the United States and essential support to the countries of the UK Commonwealth around the world.
I was able to visit Canada and the United States when I was a university student. I made two visits, one in 1960 and one in 1961. I was allowed to do paid work in Canada but not in the United States ... an enormous help that enabled me to do things in my 20s that very few in the UK had the money to do!
I chose to migrate to Canada in 1967 and quite soon after that my Canadian employer deployed me to Texas in the United States which eventually enabled my subsequent career based in the USA.
Over the ... now many ... decades I have been able to compare society in the USA with that of other parts of the world. Most commentators are good at making comparative analysis about little bits of the whole ... but hardly any look at the whole thing and even fewer look at how the different pieces have changed over time, and certainly not over all of the eight decades since the end of WWII. Right now, most of the popular economic analysis may go back to Reagan ... around 45 years ... but hardly ever goes back the full 80 years since the end of WWII.
I think this is important because a lot has changed between the early post war years and the present time. The period prior to 1980 was very different from the period since then. I wrote years ago that the global changes that took place during the 1970s were bigger than anything in all of history ... an idea that I believe still stands ... yet has been almost totally ignored in most academic and popular writing about economic and social history!
And now with Trump ... we have stupidity and ignorance on steroids!
Where this will take us is uncharted territory!
Peter Burgess