The Bankrupting of America is a broad book with an urgent message based upon research and reflection by one of the country's distinguished political economists. As David Calleo shows, the federal budget deficit is both a symptom and a cause of America's ungovernability and decline. Slowly, it has been forcing a crisis in our domestic and foreign policy, and in the federal system itself.

This progressive breakdown is not simply the fault of mistakes made in the last two or three administrations, but is deeply rooted in fiscal and monetary practices that began more than two decades ago. Step by step since the 1960s, one president after the other, cheered on by the fashionable economists of the hour, has taken the geopolitical and domestic decisions that have brought the country to its current economic situation.

1. The book deals directly with the fiscal breakdown and the context necessary to understand it. It raises--and answers--four basic questions: 1) What is a budget deficit and what does it mean?; 2) How did we get into the present budget crisis?; 3) What is it doing to us?; 4) What needs to change to get us out of it?

As Calleo sees it, the weakness of our public sector is a heavy burden for the nation. The federal political machinery is in extremely bad working order--even by its own historical standards. The federal government has grown incapable of conceiving, enacting or sustaining coherent and efficacious public policies. In a world of heightened global competition, such a government is a grave handicap.

Meanwhile, political and legal theory, instead of offsetting the natural indiscipline and incoherence of our plural system, has been inclined to celebrate and encourage its excesses.

America's geopolitical role also urgently needs reconsideration. America's excessive military spending and excessive preoccupation with global leadership distract our political system from putting its own house in order, and are more and more dysfunctional within today's more pluralistic international system. Increasingly, America's international power is called upon to compensate for its national economic inadequacy.

As its pluralism unravels at home, the United States grows excessively hegemonic abroad--a pattern that points toward both global conflict and national decay. In short, the state of the budget faithfully reflects the state of the nation. Noble traditions and abundant human and physical resources are frustrated and perverted by an inadequate public sector. Renewal requires a more serious understanding of our present difficulties, and a fresh vision of our nation and its place in the world.