Here's another one of those...

..."The Sky is Falling!" articles about the declining dollar, this time by George Will. No need to read it--you've seen it all before: the deficit will lead to inflation, the dollar is falling, and blah, blah, blah, we're all going to die! (The right-wing has to be alarmed about something.) The only thing missing is the part about Obama being a Kenya-born closet Muslim who is secretly bent on destroying the United States (yawn). For that you'll have to tune in to Fox.

Here's a table showing the dollar's value from 1800 on. You'll notice that it's been declining in value ever since, especially after the Federal Reserve was established in 1913. Now prominent economists like Glenn Beck would have you believe that there's something sinister going on here. Maybe so; I'm not an economist.

But maybe the fall in the dollar is just part of a long-term trend that is beyond the control of any American president. Maybe it just reflects the fact that the rest of the planet has made great strides economically relative to the U. S. Take India, for example; they now have the largest middle class in the world. China, too, has made a profound leap forward in the last twenty or thirty years (since they stopped making all those Great Leaps Forward, like in Mao's day).

So the dollar has been declining all of my life. In fact, it's been declining for all of my father's life. (And his father's.) Living standards, however, have only gone up. Hmmm. Maybe the falling dollar isn't that important. Maybe we should all just take a deep breath.