FIRST ON FOX: The United States must catch up to China’s digital currency in order to avoid a threat to America’s “dollar dominance,” economic experts say in a new policy volume compiled by former House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances” outlines solutions to America’s emerging fiscal crisis that is “entirely of its own making.” It features policy prescriptions from 19 scholars, mostly from the American Enterprise Institute, and is aimed at pushing concrete solutions that Congress can enact before the country is engulfed in a “debt catastrophe.”
Ryan, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital in an interview ahead of the book’s release that it was “designed to prevent America from going down the path of a debt crisis and losing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.”
“If we lose the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will massively inflict fiscal and monetary damage to our country. It will make it harder for us to finance our government, our social safety net and our economy, frankly, because interest rates will be much higher,” he said. “The fiscal policies in this book are proposals designed to fix these programs so that they’re reliable and solvent and that they don’t go into a debt crisis.”
The former speaker wrote in a forward to the volume released Thursday that America’s system of “self-governance” established over the last 250 years is being challenged worldwide by “by China’s repressive regime and other authoritarian strongholds.”
“The rules that apply to other nations don’t always apply to the United States, or at least not in the exact same way. Yet the U.S. cannot forever defy the laws of economic gravity,” the forward said, referencing the more than $31 trillion the country holds in national debt and 40-year inflation high.
Ryan says that “the world is going to digital currencies,” which presents both a challenge and opportunity for the U.S. as the new technology is taking over worldwide.
“If America wants to maintain its place as the keeper of the reserve currency of the world, which gives us huge privileges and advantages as a country, then we too should digitize our dollar so that we have the attributes of a digital dollar, which is frictionless money, which is much more efficient money,” he told Fox News Digital. “But more importantly, show the world how a free society should handle this challenge by having a two-tier system which guarantees the government has no role in the management of our money. Because the Chinese, the way they will manage money, violate privacy and liberty.”
