the more I read the scarrier parallels get

[Winetalk.com]

http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/course...14romefell.html
"Originally, this was passed out once a month. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, there was a daily distribution of pork, oil, and bread to the proletariat. Meanwhile, the expenditure on the public spectacles kept mounting. A hundred million dollars a year is a moderate estimate of what was poured out on the games. There was likewise an attempt to combine subsidy to Italian farmers with charity to needy children. This was called the alimenta and was instituted by Nerva, who reigned from 96 to 98 AD. His system was to lend money at five per cent instead of twelve per cent to farmers with the proviso that the interest should be used to support needy children. Boys received seventy cents a day, girls sixty. And then there was the army. The army was essential to the security of the empire. The cost of it, though, more than doubled between 96 and 180 AD.

All these expenditures had to be recovered from the taxpayer. To compound the difficulties, there was an adverse balance of trade. Roman currency, for example, poured into India and the East to pay for luxuries. Even in the time of Nero, Seneca estimated that it cost Rome five million dollars a year to import its luxuries from the East. In a word, though seemingly prosperous, in the second century AD the Roman empire was overspending to such an extent that it was moving to an economic crisis. When in 167 AD Marcus Aurelius was faced by the attack of the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi, he was forced to sell, is it were, the crown jewels as well as the household furnishing of his palace to finance the war.
"

could apply to todays:
1) welfare system
2) farm subsudies
3) trade defecits with bulk of US money ending up in China and India


Meni, relax, Democrats AND Republicans pull the country in the wrong direction.

Where is Ross Perot?