Obviously, you all are joking around…something that is not a laughing matter.
We built The Empire State Building, and we built a hundred New Deal huge construction projects like Hoover Dam, bridges, highways, etc. back in the 1930’s and they all resulted in the biggest Great Depression in world history.
Need a bunch of quotes from world leaders saying the same thing? It is not news.
No falsehoods. we are dropping like a rock and there is no escape.
Would you like unemployment numbers. how about deficit numbers?
From one of the OP’s quotes:
We’ve had that since, what, the 1970s? Somehow, it doesn’t strike fear into my heart to know that China’s military tech is 50 years behind ours.
Today we have a banking class that is the envy of the world.
Their healthcare is the BEST in the world.
Neither; more like a lack of interest. American style military imperialism is self destructive in the modern world as well as evil; we are hurting ourselves as well as others. I expect they’ve looked at our behavior and its results and said, “Yeah, let’s not do that.”
Chinese healthcare is the best in the world?
The U.S. was a hyperpower after WWII. There’s only one way to go after that.
Wait’ll China and Russia come into power.
They’ll be begging for us to come back.
China doesn’t have the same interest in conquest because they don’t want to get jumped. They sure took Tibet, though.
Which is right next door. Distance is no defense against American aggression.
And I doubt they are afraid of “getting jumped”, they are a nuclear power.
As was said before, China isn’t aggressive because they can’t be. They don’t have a navy to move troops in large numbers. So instead they buy African leaders off and support them with weapons in exchange for resources. Right now, China doesn’t invade… they circumvent and exploit. Because that’s all they can do, and so far it works. If Africa rebels (fat chance of that) things may change… considering that no one even gives a rip about Africa.
The other problem in the equation is Russia, and we all know how dangerous a dog they have been in the past.
And why don’t they have a navy like that? Because they aren’t interested. Pretty much no one but America seems interested in attacking far off countries anymore. America has the ability because America is willing to invest the resources for it no matter how harmful doing so is to itself.
A few years ago I was bored, so I looked up the numbers for various nations economies. What I discovered was that is China was somehow able to take over Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan, and every other Asian country tomorrow, and was somehow able to do that without harming those nations economies in the slightest, then it would still be second to the US. Every country in the largest continent on earth combined couldn’t match the US all by it’s lonesome.
In fact, the combining most of a continent into one economy has been tried. It’s called the EU. Depending on who’s numbers you use, and if you count the EU as a whole or only the eurozone, it may or may not be larger than the US economy. Either way, it’s pretty close. That took 27 nations, several of which are in the top 10 economies themselves, combined to match us.
Now granted, that was a few years ago. I haven’t looked up the stats recently. Perhaps with Chinas growth, all of Asia combined could beat America now. Maybe there is a clear winner between EU and US. However, it’s still takes entire continents joining together to match the US. Which should give you some idea of just how far ahead the US is. We might be falling, but we have a long LONG way to go before we’re merely equal to such economic shitholes as Germany, England, Japan, etc.
Susanan, I know everyone picks on you because they think you’re stupid (and apparently some jerks think its OK to gang up on the stupid) but I prefer to think you just haven’t had the facts presented to you in a way that you find compelling.
Rewriting history has become really popular lately but the fact of the matter is that stimulus spending couldn’t have resulted in the Great Depression because it came AFTER the Great Depression was in pretty full swing.
Another way to look at it would be to see how different economic policies affected the recoveries of different countries. If you take a look at how other countries handled the Great Depression you will see that the ones that engaged in stimulus spending recovered faster. The most successful used a cocktail of economic levers including currency devaluation and moderate inflation to reduce the real value of the debt that was choking up the system.
At the same time you see that one of the most aggravating factors in the global depression was the slowdown in trade, thats when it became an economic axiom that noone wins a trade war (which is not to say that we should open our markets while others do not), which is why you see these kneejerk reactions to suggestions that engage in any form of protectionism, it has worked out poorly in the past and they assume that it will work out poorly again.
When it comes to immigration, I don’t know that there is a really good answer. Immigration is great for a growing economy if labor becomes a bottleneck for growth but in a shrinking economy, the job market starts to become more of a zero sum game.
We are soon going to realize that we will need to swallow some pretty bitter medicine and realign our expectations if we want to leave anything for our grandchildren.
You can contrast the high skill (brown) Indian immigration* with low skill immigration which is indeed creating problems.**
Is Canadian hegemony an option? I would like that one.
nvmind
China is competing with the West by becoming more like the West. Once they all have cell phones and HBO, they won’t be anything to fear anymore. Widgets and baubles are really in charge, no matter what the people with the assault rifles keep trying to tell you.
Definately in decline but we are not spiraling out of control. China and India are only advancing because of their absurdly large populations. One billion Chinese live in absolute poverty. But 300 million live at working class levels or better, that is roughly the size of the US population. So China seems to do OK but this is overlooking the huge poverty issue.
China and India both have around 75% of their populations infected with latent TB for instance, according to the WHO. A nation that can’t control basic illnesses is not going to be up for any major challenges anytime soon.
The USA still remains the only nation with any real ability to influence the world as a whole. Many regional powers exist. The USA isn’t France in 1939, which was already a third or fourth rate power pretending to be a first rate power.
In terms of technology and medicine the forefront is still located in the USA. This is where the “action” is and that is good.
The USA right now is undergoing a change in its economy. We had a similar change in the 80s when we lost the manufacturing sector and changed to a service economy. That resulted in the worst recession since the 30s. Now we are undergoing a similar change as the economy adjusts again, resulting in an even worse recession than we had in the early 80s.
This downturn has weeded out a lot of the deadwood that was hired in the late 90s when jobs were everywhere.
Fear drives a lot of the talk. When radio came out, it was assumed it would harm the movies as it was free and the Great Depression was in full swing. But movies adjusted their marketing and the two did fine together. When TV came in, the same fear came about. But both radio and film adjusted their business models and learned to live together by the 1960s.
This is what we are going through now. Older businesses are resistant to change and are fighting back through court cases and technology. Eventually they will lose and adjust their business models and learn to live with the new ways of life.
So when you ask a loaded question like is the USA in decline, you’re going to get “yes” as an answer simply 'cause the USA was so far up on the scale, that it can’t go anywhere else but down. And don’t be fooled by things like “country X was up 50%.” Percents are meaningless unless you put them with their proper numbers.
After all if a town has one murder in 2009 and 2 murders in 2010, the murder rate has doubled but overall it’s not a big deal, unless you’re one of those three killed 
I don’t want to pick on Susanan, but there are a lot of people here who say some pretty stupid things and continue to cling to them despite being presented with facts and figures to the contrary.
I’ve been hearing about the “US in decline” since the 70s. Every time there is a crisis of some sort, everyone worries that the national boogyman de jour is going to dominate the world for the next thousand years. It used to be the Soviets, then the Japanese, now the Chinese.
The US has held a position of dominance for the past 50 years, but other nations are starting to catch up. China is growing rapidly, but they still have a long way to go and it remains to be seen if their growth will plateau at some point. Or even worse, if they create their own speculative bubble (not that far fetched given the amount of China hype in the past few years).
The fact is, no one can predict what will happen in the next 15, 20 or 50 years and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.