“One QUARTER OF A TRILLION DOLLARS is what the US is spending on two nations, Iraq and Afghanistan that together have a COMBINED GDP of just $23 billion.

That is lunacy. Americans have a US President who is going to say tonight — we cannot afford our future, we cannot afford investment in ourselves, but we can afford to bail out Wall Street financiers, and we can afford to pump $250 billion into two small countries abroad, but we can’t afford to do the right things by American working families — who deserve far better.

There are parts of what the President’s team is doing — particularly what Jared Bernstein, Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee have been working on — that I do support.

But the broader issue that we are going to cease deep investment in the US in a way that is big, significant and consequential — while China does everything the reverse that we are doing and reaps the rewards is a sign of America’s collapse, not America rebuilding itself.” – Read the whole article here.

Steven Clemons is a Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at The New America Foundation. He is also publisher of political blog The Washington Note.

By the way, watch Rachel Maddow’s discussion on this topic.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy