the wall street journal says around $1 billion in cash is flown out of kabul international airport every year. as with most countries, private individuals may take money out as long as they declare it. the sums, however, that are leaving afghanistan are staggering. $2,700,000 in cash is leaving the country every day. and that s only what s been declared. so more money is legally flying out of afghanistan every year than that nation collects in taxes. the journal reports that the exodus is so large u.s. investigators believe top officials in afghanistan must be funneling billions of dollars to safe havens abroad. now, some of this is inevitable. you have a very poor country in chaos and then tons of money pouring in from the outside, from the united states, japan, europe. so my concern really remains the core one i started with. why? why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when al qaeda is so weak?
one year. look, i understand that al qaeda is weak and small because we have been fighting them, chasing them, bombing their leaders. we should continue to do that. but why are we fighting this major war against the taliban? well, we fight the taliban because they are allied with al qaeda. so say people. but if al qaeda itself is so weak, why are we fighting against its allies so ferociously? this would be like fighting italy in world war ii after hitler s regime had collapsed and berlin was in flames just because italy had been allied with germany. the whole enterprise in afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem. beyond the military money, by the way, there s tens of billions of dollars that flow annually into afghanistan in aid and logistical support. and how is that money being spent? well, much of it is literally flying out of afghanistan.
the interest on the money you borrowed before. so when you look at this question of how do you get the private sector to hire more people, how do you get growth through private sector rather than through more government spending, what strikes me is if you look at corporate america the situation from the point of view of american corporations is extraordinarily healthy. they have enormous amounts of cash on their balance sheet. what that means is that they re earning lots, they have retained those earnings, and they have the money are ready to invest in plants, capital, workers, but they re not doing it. right. why are they not investing? they re not doing it because they see an outlook which is alarmingly deflationary and they see an outlook which implies higher taxes. from a democratic administration with a left of center president i don t think that s an irrational expectation right now. and that s why i think some kind of really quite radical policy step, preferably announce
cheaply, you can spend the money now, and then you will get more growth and that will mean much bigger tax revenues, worry about the deficit later. he had a column i think a couple of days ago in which he said is this so difficult to understand? spend now when you need to jumpstart the economy, save later. i would say the u.s. has a kind of stay of execution while the european crisis unfolds, but at some point the nasty fiscal arithmetic will get any country, even the united states, which is seen as of course the most attractive, most safe haven country to invest in. i ve been saying for a while that u.s. treasuries are a safe haven the way pearl harbor was a safe haven in early 1941. it s safe until it s not safe. it s safe until the bond market says wait a second, this isn t sustainable, we d like a risk premium. once suddenly find your interest payments rising, it s very quickly a shift into a death spiral, a kind of tailspin in which things compound. the greeks have been there. s
real boost i think pfarticularl to private sector business constant, we have way out. to complicate the story even further, though, the difference between the 70s and now if you re a corporate ceo, is you re looking at china, indonesia, brazil which are growing very fast and you re looking at your balance sheet and you have all this money and you re saying i could open a plant in america with whatever, $50,000 average worker s wages or i could open it in china at $10,000. but of course in the 1970s you had japan and you had west germany and there were lots of people who said it s over for the united states, these new dynamic post-war economies are going to clean our clock. i don t think it s a foregone conclusion that china overtakes united states as the biggest economy in the world in 2027, as some people forecast, though it is a foregone conclusion i think now that it will be the biggest manufacturer in the world next year. the key question, and i ve just been thinking a lot abo