America on its way down. Is it?

[Sailor Steve]

Some good questions. Economics being my weakest point, all I can give is thoughts, not ideas.

Originally Posted by Skybird

I But do not try to just raise a flame war on a personally unwanted opinion. Give solid reasons, if you disagree. I am not launching this to raise a heated debate. I am just curuous on how Amerians react if bein confronted with percpetions and obwsevraitons on their country that may be seen as highly contradictory to the "official" ideological self-understanding of the US. none of what the author writes is in support of what is knwon to be the "American dream".

Part of the problem there is human nature. I can talk about my problems all I want, but if you mention them without being asked, you are instantly the enemy. We all do that.

Your main text covers Europeans' attitudes and opinions, so I don't have a clue to any answers there.

are those ultra-rich donators just abusing a flaw in the system to avoid mandatory tax payments that threaten to come at them anyway?

I don't think so. While someone like Bill Gates pays taxes on all his income, including interest income, his actual fortune is not taxed (at least as I understand it), so new taxes can be reduced by write-offs, but it doesn't affect the money he already has. Offering several billion dollars to help those less fortunate than himself is helping, no matter what his real reasons for doing so.

Originally Posted by August

Foreign people, mostly Europeans, have been prognosticating my countries imminent doom ever since it was founded. For almost two and a half centuries they have turned out to be wrong.

True, but then so have nay-sayers here as well. The bad news is we don't really know what's around the corner. As with any "crisis", warnings are based on observations which may or may not be valid, and should be at least looked at. Of course this doesn't mean turning into Chicken Little every time a leaf hits us on the head.

Hard times have come and gone in my country and they will continue to do so. Folks who believe we're in some kind of end game are either missing the point that life is what you make of it, or, like your beloved Speigel, are secretly hoping for it to be true.

Again, that's not just outsiders. The biggest opportunity to fail and die as a country came in 1929, but that was true for the rest of the world as well. We survived that, and optimism about surviving what's going on to day is well founded. Of course some unforseen problem may come along and kill us before we know what happened, but that's always the risk we take just by being alive.

I agree about some people wanting us to fail, but that is also domestic. As I said at first, I think we tend to get our backs up when someone from the outside says it.

Originally Posted by yubba

our government and the people that we sent to Washington they forgot that they work for the american public, some where along the line they think they are royalty,and the american people are sheep too be sheared.

I think that began when Congressional salaries started outstripping the average American pay. When it pays so well it becomes a career rather than a service it starts to breed the oft-mentioned delusions of grandeur.

On the other hand, your post seems to be a specifically-aimed tirade that does little to address Skybird's questions.

[August]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I agree about some people wanting us to fail, but that is also domestic. As I said at first, I think we tend to get our backs up when someone from the outside says it.

I agree and i'd also postulate that because of today's world wide media these negative messages have a far wider ranging domestic influence than they did in previous times.

Perception can often become reality.

[Platapus]

Yup, The United States is in some pretty serous trouble in multiple levels.

But on the whole, it is still a pretty nice place to live and a good place to invest your money.

We will survive just fine. We may change, but our country has changed many times since its creation and we have done just fine.

I like it here.

[Tchocky]

Mm, doubt it. The US has, for better or worse, been the most powerful country for most of the last 50-60 years. That is changing as the world changes, and any change in the status of the US will be read by some as imminent doom.

In reponse to August I've noticed this more from Americans, but less seriously. It seems like a major theme for most political parties, "we must do X/elect X/vote X or else our American way of life will disappear", this kind of thing. Which sounds like THE END IS NIGH guys, how very surprised they must be to wake up in the morning.
What certain foreigners tend to do is look externally, Iraq/Afghanistan etc, and predict the End of America, which sort of misses the point as well as being laden with Schadenfreude

For what it's worth, the US has a strange, strange history, and it hasn't progressed or regressed to the same songbook as most countries. I figure it won't in the future, either.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

I agree and i'd also postulate that because of today's world wide media these negative messages have a far wider ranging domestic influence than they did in previous times.

Perception can often become reality.

Or they just adequatel describe the reality.

So the question is if that essay is right, partially right and wrong, or allout wrong. To assume that the author tells a fiction he wants to see become a reality, is just that: an assumption, maybe even a malicous attempt to reject the message by miscriditing the messenger, but if just stated without providing any hints or even evidence for the author's motivationit, then at least it even is a completely unfounded assumption, as a matter of fact.

The statistics on unemployement, shift in welath structures, social structure etc etc are hardly all becasue of wishful thinling by ameroican analysts wishing the US bad.

I think you make it too easy for yourself.

[Diopos]

I'll through another idea in the bag.

"America on its way down" vs "the rest of the world on its way up"

Maybe a perculiar argument in the face of the current economical crisis but if you step back and see what was the situation outside USA in the '50s, '60s, ' 70s etc you'll get it.


.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Diopos

I'll through another idea in the bag.

"America on its way down" vs "the rest of the world on its way up"

Maybe a perculiar argument in the face of the current economical crisis but if you step back and see what was the situation outside USA in the '50s, '60s, ' 70s etc you'll get it.


.

Kind of the central argument of Zakaria's "Post American World." Interesting read on how China and India could be the new world superpowers in the not too distant future.

[Bubblehead1980]

Currently we are on our way down.We have a President and political party in power that is "post American" he/they does not believe in the constitution or will of the people but tat they are royalty and somehow above it all, that they know best.Things will get better though.I believe Americans learned a lot from the Bush Presidency as well as the election of Obama and giving Democrats(any part really) that much power.

America is at a crossroads for sure, but we will recover as we always do.We have had bad leaders before, long before we were born and survived it.I hate to quote FDR but "we will endure as we have endured" and things will get better.Then perhaps we will learn our lesson and rid ourselves of the disease known as Liberalism

[Platapus]

you must be a riot at parties.

[Tchocky]

I think the author is confusing the effects of a housing/lending catastrophe with intense sociological decline.
What happens when you have millions of junk mortgages going bust? Millions of houses empty in Heartland USA. It's a visceral and highly potent image of economic mismanagement, giving stories of families living in expensive cars. What it is not is a profound new weakness in American society. The problems in the US economy are due to a highly specific set of causal factors, almost none of which are particular to the US, and has consequences which are also shared by other developed nations. America's universities are still world-renowned (if not ideally accessible - but this is probably why), it's companies employ millions abroad, it's military is still potent.

Also, pivoting a paragraph on data from the New York post and a quote from Arianna Huffington? That wouldn't get much credibility here at SUBSIM

[Konovalov]

No one stays on top for ever. Anyway I'm off for a holiday to the US late next month to spend my hard earned tourist pounds.

[Skybird]

Some quotes to help getting this back on track. "Deletion of the social middle class", is one of the slogans.

The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.

More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and are using up their savings, the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.
Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are.

Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Where did all the money go? All the enormous market gains and corporate earnings, the profits from the boom in the financial markets and the 110-percent increase in the gross national product in the last 30 years? It went to those who had always had more than enough already.

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s, except that hardly anyone has minded until now.

In America, the free market is king, and people with low incomes are seen as having only themselves to blame. Those who make a lot of money are applauded -- and emulated. The only problem is that Americans have long overlooked the fact that the American Dream was becoming a reality for fewer and fewer people.

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4-percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation.

So far, politicians have failed to come up with solutions for the growing social crisis. Washington is still waiting for jobs that aren't coming. President Barack Obama and his administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the notion that Americans will eventually pull themselves up by their bootstraps -- preferably by doing the same thing they've always done: spending money. Domestic consumer spending is responsible for two-thirds of American economic output.

But even though Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to pump money into the market, and even though the government deficit has now reached the dizzying level of $1.4 trillion, such efforts have remained unsuccessful.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last week, and described communities that couldn't even afford to maintain their streets anymore.

The problem is that many Americans can no longer spend money on consumer products, because they have no savings. In some cases, their houses have lost half of their value. They no longer qualify for low-interest loans. They are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.
(...)
Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.

I personally think that any president would be relatively helpless in adressing these things for positive effect, even more so how closely he is tied into obligations to lobby groups. Poltiical decisions, that were creating influence in the outcome that now has been acchieved, were made and are being maintained since decades. A historic fixpoint maybe would be the thematic complex of Vietnam, gold reserves and Bretton Woods.

[gimpy117]

The fact that the Uber rich have such amounts of money that they can donate as the amount that has been pledged is astounding.

The fact of the matter is, If america has a equitable economy, one that ensured fair wages for the poor, there would be no need to pledge so much money to the poor.

Sadly, I feel that america has left its lower and middle class behind due to spiraling greed. heres nice quote from the Wall street journal

..."As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

That was posted in 2006...and im supposing it hasn't changed.

oh and here's a nice graph:


So essentially, with wages falling...while productivity still the same and profits rising, The Companies and Uber rich have let wages stagnate or even lowered them, while taking the profits of this and putting it into their bank account.

Its becoming harder to live in this country now, the same place where in the 60's through the 70's a middle class family could have a nice car, a nice house, health care and do it on ONE INCOME. Where is that now? its gone, kaput. Sure, Back then we worked hard, But today, we still work hard...but haven't seen our wages go up at the same rate everything else has.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by gimpy117

The fact of the matter is, If america has a equitable economy, one that ensured fair wages for the poor, there would be no need to pledge so much money to the poor.

Raise the minimum wage, and prices go up to compensate. The poor remain where they are.

Take from the rich and give to the poor, and you take away the incentive to be productive. And you have to use the government to do it, which means increasing the size of the government. And government workers already make far more than the average worker, so you increase the vicious circle. That is what got us into trouble in the first place, not individuals amassing wealth.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The statistics on unemployement, shift in welath structures, social structure etc etc are hardly all becasue of wishful thinling by ameroican analysts wishing the US bad.

I think you make it too easy for yourself.

I make it how I make it, and make no mistake Sky, regardless of what Speigel or anyone else says, I and my fellow Americans are making it. You want evidence then there it is. I don't need to rely on some unreferenced statistics of at least questionable origin and context. I'm a trade school teacher and see it myself. I deal with the very people that Speigel is talking about every day and can recite literally hundreds of success stories that I am personally acquainted with. Real people making better lives for them and their families.

As I said, if we had listened to the doubters our country would have fallen apart hundreds of years ago. They have always underestimated us and while I won't claim to know what Speigels motivations are in this particular article, I do know that the picture they are painting from 3000 miles away is not the picture that I'm seeing here with my own eyes.