“It’s just a flesh wound.”
As a nation, we’ll survive. Not as the power we once were, but we’ll still be around. Just because the British Empire disintegrated disn’t mean that Britain vanished. The same will happen to the US.
Is the US in serious trouble, trouble so bad that our survival as a nation is very much in question?
I expect it will sink in the world stage a bit as other countries with more progressive governments pass it by.
That is my feeling. We are hitting a pretty bad spot domestically and our standards of living are going to go down.
Some things will generally continue to get better and better each year
Renewable energy
Scientific and medical advances
Agricultural development
Communication tools
Social/civil rights
etc.
But I think economically things will be bad for a while due to a ton of reasons.
Is this an “Obama is a Communist!” comment or a “The Chinese OWN the US!” comment?
as it relates to the rest of the world, we’ve passed our peak and are on the downward slope.
i don’t think that foretells the death of our nation, but if it turns out that that’s something we can’t handle collectively, and if our culture doesn’t make a few adjustments to that new reality, then maybe it may be a problem.
That’s more or less how I feel. For most of the past century, the United States ruled many other countries as economic serfs. While places like Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, and Panama were nominally independent countries, in practice the governments of those countries had no choice but to obey the United States. In fifty years, I expect that the United States will be an economic serf of China. As to whether we’ll actually be occupied by Chinese troops, maybe. It wouldn’t surprise me.
The reasons are clear. Number one, we’re piling up a massive debt with no reasonable prospect of stopping. China’s sovereign wealth fund holds over a trillion dollars of our debt and is the only realistic candidate for holding most of the future debt that we’re going to generate. The USA is the debtor and China is the creditor. Creditors hold power over debtors, not the other way around.
Number two, most of American manufacturing has been closed down and moved overseas; China has gotten the biggest chunk of it. History teaches that power moves along with the ability to manufacture stuff. Countries that can make actual, physical necessities have power over countries that need to buy those necessities.
Number three, there’s a difference in attitude. American isn’t the frisky, young nation that it once was. Our companies aren’t leaders in innovation anymore. Many of the biggest corporations are either criminal enterprises or else they just mooch off the government. Special interest groups only try to grab money and power for themselves, without caring about any sense of duty to the country. Politicians only care about getting re-elected. China, on the other hand, is frisky. The Chinese are showing an ability to innovate and make political change that we just can’t do anymore.
The 20th century was the American century, but this century is the Chinese century.
No, just a smaller fish swimming in a bigger pond.
The most worrying thing is that if a non-merkin had posted this OP say, as little as 2-3 years ago they would have been spit-roasted.
I remember one now long forgotten poster replying to a question on the rise of China saying that it wasn’t an issue, because if the Chinese encroached on US supremacy then they’d be “glassed”. Don’t hear that very often now.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Pogo was ahead of his time. I’ve never believed this current economic mess is a recession, nor a precursor to a depression. For me both predispose an active, but shrinking, economy (hopefully temporary). I think it’s much, much worse to the point a fundamental fracturing of the entire economic process. I’m sure those whose skills and knowledge of economic theory will trot out the numbers to prove me wrong and that’s fine. I just believe that the numbers are not be all and end all. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees is meaningless when the view is obsured by smoke hiding a conflagration just over the next rise that can take out everything.
Coupled with partisanship and polarization across American society (and not just politics), and a Me First! attitude that seems to permeate across the board, and I don’t see America returning to anything like I grew up in for much of my life.
I don’t know the exact quote, but Winston Churchill once made a remark to the effect of
I trust America to do the right thing - after exhausting all other possibilities.
There’s a some truth in that. Somehow, we have a knack for stumbling around until it somehow works out.
Agree that relative world power standing may be iffy, dependent on policies, and major way-of-living changes may be in the works, but “survival as a nation” is not in immediate jeopardy.
OTOH, for some people out there, what they mean by “survival as a nation” is tied up with the aforementioned “way of living” issues, and it worries them that this is no longer the country they knew… Well, the nation has been through that before, not just in politico-economic terms but in socio-cultural terms, and that it continued to evolve socially and culturally was in part what kept it able to adapt and stay in the race succesfully.
I would trust Americans to do the right thing, but not politicians, because politicians are run by lobby groups and lobby groups are the biggest enemy to doing anything right in America at this point. That and the television that keeps the masses entertained, bedazzled and misdirected so they don’t ask any hard questions.
I’m not sure about Chinese supremacy - if you accept peak oil, it might cause their manufacturing for the entire world to come crashing down (if you can’t ship cheaply, manufacturing goes back to the countries of origin).
Will the US as a nation survive? I think so, but it will look a whole lot different in a 100 years than it does now.
I don’t think we’re in any danger; typically what happens is that when things get interesting enough, there’s a shift of some sort in our two-party system, and one of the parties dies or changes significantly. I mean, we no longer have Whigs or Federalists, and the Republican party of 1955 was a far different beast than today’s Republican Party.
Manufacturing isn’t something that we’ve lost the capacity to do; quite a bit of manufacturing is still done within the US; it just isn’t the labor-intensive kind that’s cheaper to do in places like Mexico and China. If for some reason (say… rising Chinese wages) it became economical to do it here again, we definitely could do so.
What worries me is the aforementioned lack of compromise that I see- growing up, I don’t recall the politicians viewing the other party as “the enemy”, like they seem to these days. Nor do I remember Republicans or Democrats espousing the belief that the other party’s policies were unpatriotic, or the road to ruination, or that they’re immoral, evil bastards on the other side of the line. At least, I don’t remember the rhetoric being turned to 11 on that stuff.
I think the hard part for our politicians is going to be to figure out a way to offer opportunity for the lower / lower middle classes, without massive wealth redistribution programs, which will alienate everyone else. There has to be a middle course that doesn’t require playing governmental Robin Hood, and that encourages the lower/lower middle to not rely on government for things. I believe this will be the challenge for the next century.
I expect a relatively peaceful dissolution of our Republic within about 25 years, when future taxpayers walk away from their national debt the way we have allowed current debtholders to walk away from theirs. We are the predatory borrowers from future generations.
We currently plan to borrow about 1.4 Trillion dollars out of an annual spend of 3.8 Trillion. To call this unsustainable under-emphasizes how absurd it is. Mandatory spending alone is expected to exceed annual revenues in about 25 years. And these are optimistic projections. Should we be successful in prolonging life they may well be wildly optimistic.
The current administration and congress, along with the one that preceded it, have taken the position that we should spend now to maintain our current desires and work out the future in the future. Projections are made–always reflecting future administrations–that the numbers will somehow improve. This will not happen. Recall that ten years ago the CBO forcast was for an annual surplus for 2009-12 of over 750 Billion dollars; we’ll run something like a 1.25 Trillion-dollar deficit instead over each of those years.
We are deficit-spending to this degree with no significant crisis. We are not at war with any nation able to destroy us or the world. We are not responding to a nation-threatening environmental catastrophe of some kind. Any economic threat is internal to a system which promoted borrowing by the incompetent and greedy and allowed a financial system to make speculative bets based on that incompetent borrowing that were backed by the public coffer.
We will not survive this and we have already showed our willingness to steal from our descendants in order to avoid discomfort now. 25 years or so from now, we’ll simply walk away from our accumulated debt by dissolving the union which created it.
What does dissolving the union have to do with walking away from our debt? You don’t have to commit suicide to resort to bankruptcy.
I think the American government is going to face some big challenges to its survival in its current form, and inability to service the national debt could be the trigger for such a constitutional crisis. But that’s a far cry from the utterly unnecessary move of devolving into independent nations of Rhode Island, Indiana, Delaware and what have you.
Personally, I’d keep an eye on any blog/message board/news “chatter” over an Article 5 Constitutional amendment process, AKA a constitutional convention. That could be a harbinger of an upcoming political crisis, I (idly) suspect.
So you believe your “gut feeling” trumps actual economic data and analysis?
Wel, I don’t know how old you are but Americans seem to have a knack for pining over a history that really wasn’t as magical as they remember.
I do get what you are saying though. Ever since I can remember (lets say since the 80s), there has been one financial crisis after another. And each one seems to be based on the collapse of a speculative bubble and each one seems worse than the last. First it was the S&L bailouts of the 80s. Then it was the dot-com crash of 2001 followed by the fall of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Worldcom and so on and finally the most recent recession.
The general sense is that we are moving away from being a nation that actually invents and builds stuff into a nation that just pays a small percentage of the work force a lot of money to move numbers around spreadsheets (or invent laws for moving those numbers around, enforce the compliance of those laws or provide advisory services on how to manuever through that system of laws). And not surprisingly, those people will come up with ever increasingly complicated schemes for moving those numbers around until periodically the system is no longer sustainable and it crashes.
What this will mean is that you will have a larger and increasingly more educated workforce unable to find meaningful work. They will put ever increasing pressure on the government to provide support, driving debt ever higher.
Nonsense. Due to our crumbling educational system most people don’t know who Mao was. 
Our corporate masters will put up a statue of that {deleted} Sam Walton, the guy who spearheaded taking our low wage, few benefit jobs to even lower wage, no benefits, places in Asia.
For those people who think our situation is so bad that the survival of our nation is in question, well, which countries have ceased to exist recently? The Soviet Union? Russia still exists.
The only countries that have dissolved in the last hundred years were multiethnic multilingual empires, like the Soviet Union, or Austria-Hungary, or Yugoslavia. The United States isn’t constituted like that.
As for the contentions that we’ll be owned by China, well, that’s pretty silly. If we owe trillions of dollars to China, and we default, what happens next? The same thing that happens to all the other countries in the world that have defaulted on their national debt. Countries don’t have to cease to exist to default on their debts. They just refuse to pay, and the people who lent them money are screwed. The penalty is that people are less willing to loan you money in the future.
And China itself is a poor country. It is poorer per capita than Mexico. If in the next few decades China’s economy grows to be larger than America’s, China will still have 4 times the population–which means that in real terms people in China will have 1/4 the wealth of Americans. China’s economic growth is nothing to fear.
I see this sort of whinging and hand-wringing as just another form of American Exceptionalism. America is a special country, and if we’re not the bestest and mostest specialist country in the world, we must be the worst. Other countries muddle through problems, but America can’t, because we’re unique, and our problems are worse and our leaders worse and our people greedier and stupider.
Travel to Mexico someday to see what a country with problems looks like. Is the survival of Mexico as a nation in question?
IMO:
Financially, the US might be in trouble soon.
Racially, I don’t see a problem, but some do.
Politically, if Washington politicians were to fly to Mars and then Mars were to explode, I know I would be dancing in the street.
Financially–if the Federal Gov’t decides to cut spending and raise taxes I think that’ll hurt too many people. I recall reading the other day that Pres. Obama wants to go this route.
If they stop printing money and default on debt then we’ll see deflation. I don’t know how much that’ll hurt. Buy greenbacks and precious metals.
If they keep printing money and don’t cut spending then were going to inflate, and that’ll hurt.
But, I don’t see this nation falling apart any time soon. You bet’cha.
Well, I think the concern is that we could become a country like Mexico. Or that more of our cities would turn into places like Detroit.
It is my view that the US (and other democratic first world countries to a somewhat lesser degree) will experience a long slow demise with respect to their priviledged position that they hold today.
As long as this incessent drive for globalization of the economies of the world exist, the underclass of American society will slide further and further behind. Less democratic regimes will continue to employ their populations to manufacture for the middle class of America under less stringent and more flexible conditions.
A clash of the classes will be a long brew and the powerful manufacturing corporations who don’t care who they emply to provide their wealth will keep the lid on as long as possible.
The technological might that America has today is an illusion. The advantage in any particular area is short lived and only relevant within the framework of like minded countries who respect patents and international law.
Militarily, the West and its military prowess has already become irrelevant. The insurgents have already demonstrated that for us in Afghanistan. America and its first world allies no longer have the stomach. to fight.
We’ve seen this before in the decline of empires.
Look to China for the future. Presently they have achieved prosperity by manufacturing for the 1st world market. They will get to a point where their citizenry will be their best market for their own manufacturing base and no longer need the west. I understand they already manufacture more cars than America.
And they don’t have recalls.
Their free market with unhindered central government support and massive information controlled population will buy their way in to becoming the global leader with their fingers in the pie of every other economy and important resource in the world.
I don’t see any other way around that