9 for the ‘90s : Be They 9 or 89, Individuals Harbor Strong Ideas About What the Future Holds : Caught in a Crunch

Stanley Sheinbaum, 69, paints a darkly comic vignette to illustrate the state of the nation near the year 2000. The Malaysians, says the political activist and publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly, will be organizing vacation tours to the United States, featuring a stop in the Napa Valley vineyards, where tourists will observe picturesque Californians crushing grapes by foot.

Current geopolitical power shifts are likely to leave the United States in a crunch between an aggressive Japan and a unified European marketplace.

“I worry about a long-term gradual slide,” says Sheinbaum of the American living standard and the concurrent power slippage in competing international markets.

The catalyst for the downturn is the much lamented but unresolved foreign debt, for which the unwillingness of government leaders to face the financial crisis is to blame, he says.

Currently, Japanese investments in U.S. real estate and Treasury securities are helping to offset the trade deficit. But Sheinbaum agrees with economists who predict that after 1992, the Japanese may switch their investments to the European community.

Meanwhile, it is the taxpayer’s dollar that is financing the foreign debt, and the results of the drain on other potential areas of funding, from education to bridges and roads, will become more dramatic, he says.

In cities, apartment blocks will replace private homes, which will continue to become even more of a luxury of the wealthy, he theorizes. College will become too expensive for even some upper middle class youths, while corporations, unable to find appropriately educated American employees, will accelerate establishment of operations abroad. College-age youths will be accepting jobs in Burger Kings at a third of what young people typically earned 10 years ago.

“We’re still convinced we’re the most powerful nation in the world,” Sheinbaum says sardonically. The way to regain that status, he says, is to raise taxes.

But, he says, “we have cowards on both sides of politics, Democrats as well as Republicans.”