The fall of the United States of America

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[AmPM]

I sometimes feel like democracy isn't working anymore in countries like America. With the mass media engine turning the minds of children and adults across the country to utter mush, I sincerely believe the majority of people do not know what is best for them. Here in Canada, being in close proximity to the US, we have similar problems, but nothing as bad as there. I personally

think there needs to be a more centralized form of democracy put into action, but evidently it's too late for that. The extreme capitalism in America has completely corrupted the upper echelons of power, so many government officials are paid by private interests, so the entire country is pretty much unsalvageable at this point.

Actually, it has more to do with the people that do vote. See, either way the middle class is screwed, no matter what party is in. That leaves the rich and the poor to actually care about voting. Guess which section is larger and the least educated?

Pretending corruption and ignorance is an American problem is silly. Look at China, the EU, UK, the Middle East, the rest of Asia and Asia Minor, etc. Politicians gain power, power corrupts. People have to work instead of go to school, no education. It's sad but it's the way it is.

Personally, I will be glad when Europe starts dealing with the problems surrounding it in Africa and the Middle East, then we can go back to getting our house back in order. That doesn't even mean militarily, but they could stop whining about how the US does things, and put more aid into foreign countries to take the load off.

I'm of the opinion we should cut all foreign aid money and redirect it internally. Elimination of poverty comes through putting kids through school, not through social welfare benefits. More money to schools, more money to medicine for those who CANNOT afford it, not to people who choose not to afford it. More money back into our own economy.

[Poppi]

One thing that i find super interesting about Americas future (that is rarely brought up) is how in the past like 2-3 years College is the next minimum requirement .

I remember in the 90s a GED or High school diploma was enough to get a job. And a associates was pretty awesome. But now 4 years of college, high GPA, half a dozen certifications and that isnt shit in some cities.

Granted some place in US, college isnt a big deal. But in major cities average job blow is holding a college diploma, or should be, or on the way to.

i know a college diploma doesnt mean your smart or you know what your doing (i think College in america is just another industry). In reality experience is the best teacher.

But the bar has been raised when it comes to what the min. education needed to be successful . Maybe it also weeds out the retards and the undetermined?
Or maybe its just fucking everyone over and denying them true learning experience on the job, by telling people "you need 4+ years of extra school".

Maybe WW3 against china will boost US economy and turn it into a super industrious nation again.

[DarkSoldierX]

One thing that i find super interesting about Americas future (that is rarely brought up) is how in the past like 2-3 years College is the next minimum requirement .

I remember in the 90s a GED or High school diploma was enough to get a job. And a associates was pretty awesome. But now 4 years of college, high GPA, half a dozen certifications and that isnt shit in some cities.

Granted some place in US, college isnt a big deal. But in major cities average job blow is holding a college diploma, or should be, or on the way to.

i know a college diploma doesnt mean your smart or you know what your doing (i think College in america is just another industry). In reality experience is the best teacher.

But the bar has been raised when it comes to what the min. education needed to be successful . Maybe it also weeds out the retards and the undetermined?
Or maybe its just fucking everyone over and denying them true learning experience on the job, by telling people "you need 4+ years of extra school".

Maybe WW3 against china will boost US economy and turn it into a super industrious nation again.

Too bad war nowdays actualy makes the economy 2000x worse.

But hey atleast everyone has a job, 11b lol.

[Poppi]

Too bad war nowdays actualy makes the economy 2000x worse.

But hey atleast everyone has a job, 11b lol.

well war made the economy worse b/c it didnt create jobs really. Probably just made the rich firms the politicians and generals invested in richer.

WW3 with china would involve more homefront firms needed and we cant oursource our production anymore.

But now im sounding like that crazy general from MW2.

[roflmao]

War never makes country richer. I've never understood that myth. You don't create wealth by destroying.

Sure, WW2 created employment, but it also created rationing everywhere. The nation was very poor because all the money was going to building tanks. That's hardly prosperity.

As for the "fall" of the US. Yeah, not really. If anything the country is stagnating and becoming more like Europe. It's very sad that what has been (rightfully) called the land of opportunity, and the most dynamic country in the world, is starting to become like other countries in europe due to massive increases in [dumb] regulations and bigger government, but that's hardly equivalent to the downfall of Rome :p.

[Demon767]

One thing that i find super interesting about Americas future (that is rarely brought up) is how in the past like 2-3 years College is the next minimum requirement .

I remember in the 90s a GED or High school diploma was enough to get a job. And a associates was pretty awesome. But now 4 years of college, high GPA, half a dozen certifications and that isnt shit in some cities.

Granted some place in US, college isnt a big deal. But in major cities average job blow is holding a college diploma, or should be, or on the way to.

i know a college diploma doesnt mean your smart or you know what your doing (i think College in america is just another industry). In reality experience is the best teacher.

But the bar has been raised when it comes to what the min. education needed to be successful . Maybe it also weeds out the retards and the undetermined?
Or maybe its just fucking everyone over and denying them true learning experience on the job, by telling people "you need 4+ years of extra school".

Maybe WW3 against china will boost US economy and turn it into a super industrious nation again.

welcome to australia where you must have a degree to get anywhere career wise. even then it is not guranteed

[Groundfire]

War never makes country richer. I've never understood that myth. You don't create wealth by destroying.

Sure, WW2 created employment, but it also created rationing everywhere. The nation was very poor because all the money was going to building tanks. That's hardly prosperity.

While I do not like the concept that war can create short term prosperity, you can actually look at that statement two ways. It's actually a very wicked theory, one of which I dont support in the least but it's something the political class and wealthy elite keep in their back pocket as a means to keep them out of trouble or for a distraction. (think libya, help those poor alqueda rebels)

First, war stimulates production. In a consumer based economy, this is huge. It doesnt really matter if the country is rationing certain commodities, what matters is that everyone has a job and instead of that generated wealth being used on goods that are rationed or junk from china, more people will put their hard earned money into assets like real estate, or new business capital.

Secondly is that war stimulates profiteering. If the US still engages in nation building, there are always going to be those private companies and special interests that exist to go in and clean up the mess or to help conduct the war from a support side. It's the military industrial complex. We all know it exists. Anyone can go to Blackwater or Hal burton and ask what they do, they make it pretty apparent.


Also, regarding this:

As for the "fall" of the US. Yeah, not really. If anything the country is stagnating and becoming more like Europe. It's very sad that what has been (rightfully) called the land of opportunity, and the most dynamic country in the world, is starting to become like other countries in europe due to massive increases in [dumb] regulations and bigger government, but that's hardly equivalent to the downfall of Rome :p.

You would be right if our country was not devaluing the world's reserve currency. Money is fragile, you cant abuse it. If for some reason our Dollar was to not be accepted by the world (because we just keep on printing more of it from nothing) then you would see your standard of living fall very far very fast. The grocerys would be there in the store and you would need to bring a wheel-barrel of $20s to stock your fridge, and that is if we go into a straight hyperinflationary situation, instead of the stag-flation you noted in the quote.

Anywho, that's my 2 cents.

[roflmao]

You're right, War stimulates profiteering and adds 'wealth' to war-related industries, but not for the rest of the country. Blackwater might come out winning, but not the rest (and more important) part of the economy. Everyone else ends up losing because they are having to pay for the war.

War stimulates production in war-based industries. I'm pretty sure Jeep benefitted from WW2, but I doubt a marketplace that sells apples did. In my humble opinion keynesian aggregates are meaningless. The economy isn't a big blob of "GDP", there are no "GDP factories" anywhere. The 'economy' is never sick or well, because the economy isn't one thing, it is an incredibly complex set of millions of interactions across thousands of different industries involving millions of people, and stimulating one of those industries at the expense of the rest isn't going to generate prosperity overall.

I admit that building tanks and preparing for war involves a whole variety of industries, but then I just return to my previous post. Sure, there was almost 0% unemployment, but since the nation was so busy pouring resources down a virtual black hole prosperity was only a mirage.

It was after WW2 that the economy took off. Huge influx of  labor, less taxes and less tanks to be built. Keynesian economists at the time predicted disaster after the end of the stimulus bill called 'WW2'. Paul Samuelson, a prominent Keynesian, warned in 1943 that when the war ended, the decrease in spending combined with the surge of returning soldiers to the labor force would lead to "the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced", but disaster didn't happen

Just my humble opinion

As you can probably guess, I'm not a big fan of the recent stimulus bill, haha!

[Groundfire]

Neither am I  

Im just saying that I can recognize how and why the 40's were prosperous with the war. Each new war industry factory that employes 1000-2000 (or much more) workers a piece or so begins to stack up and was on average, I would say, enough to kick the US economy to life after 20 years of depression.

Economies can also snowball to success so long as the people are receiving base spending money by legitimate production, which is what we had in the late 40's.

Not that I find anything good about governmental spending at all, but whatever kind of governmental spending we did back in the 40s was a heap ton better than todays situation, which through QE1 and 2, trillions of tax payers dollars went straight into the pockets of Wall street bankers and the Elite CEOs. I am shocked that we haven't hung those bastards by their ties from the street lamps for such blatant robbery, but I think people will wake up soon.

I think we're on the same page Rofl.

[Mysthalin]

You guys do realise that the reason why the great depression was as bad as it was had a lot to do with the banks NOT being bailed out?

Think about it this way. If a bank goes bankrupt - everybody who had money in the bank is going to lose all of their savings - which will massively affect the economy :

Short term:
*People will immediately stop spending as much.
*Companies immediately stop any and all investment, as there is nowhere to borrow money from, and if there is the interest rates are too ridiculous to be worth it. Selling stock to cover investment expenditures does not work either, as people have lost their savings. Long-term growth is the first thing to go.

Medium term:
*Companies cut down on workers as people have begun spending less money. Less demand equals less opportunity to sell at competitive prices.
*People losing jobs causes a second dip in aggregate national demand. Companies yet again are forced to cut down on wages and on employees (which is self-perpetuating until finally the economy goes back into balance.. But the point of balance will include ridiculous unemployment and a massive dip in GDP.

Long term:
*The government is spending billions if not trillions of dollars to support the massive number of newly unemployed people via benefits.
*The government is spending billions of dollars to combat the increase in both crime and poor health (symptoms that go hand-in-hand with a general drop in the quality of life and wide-spread unemployment).

The country still ends up having to eat massively into it's own budget, but on top of that they now have a recession to deal with.

It's what happened during the great depression, anyway.

[Unkn0wn]

As for the "fall" of the US. Yeah, not really. If anything the country is stagnating and becoming more like Europe. It's very sad that what has been (rightfully) called the land of opportunity, and the most dynamic country in the world, is starting to become like other countries in europe due to massive increases in [dumb] regulations and bigger government, but that's hardly equivalent to the downfall of Rome :p.

Since when is becoming 'more like Europe' a bad thing? Euroepean countries have some of the best social security systems in the world, with the highest life expectancy rates, the lowest poverty rates and what could be considered generally the 'happiest' people in the world (7 out of the top 10 countries in the latest gallup poll were european).

I think sometimes Americas forget NOT having regulations and big government is what got them into this mess in the first place. Nor is it what is causing the United States to no longer be a 'land of opportunity'.

Not to mention that the whole notion of the United States being 'a shining city upon a hill' is just ludicrous. I'm glad Obama has at least brought some modesty in that regard. There's nothing shameful about being 'just a nation among others'. I guess it sucks if you used to be top dog and then you have to accept you no longer are, but it's time Americans get over that. Britain eventually had to get over it, Germany had to get over it many times, superpowers come and go, world orders come and go, all you can do is accept it and ride the tides.

That doesn't even mean militarily, but they could stop whining about how the US does things, and put more aid into foreign countries to take the load off.

You do realise the European Union, and not the United States, is the world's largest provider of international aid, right? It's true though that European countries need to take a larger share in the management of NATO affairs, there's still too much burden on the United States. (History plays a significant role in this) Though for all I care they might as well abolish NATO or reduce it to being a defensive pact again.  

Also, US military expenditures are outrageous. I see republicans all up in arms over the US budget deficit being so vast, yet none of them have the balls to even THINK about tackling the largest culprit. Iraq and Afghanistan have literally cost the US TRILLIONS of dollars already. And don't even get me started on the 'tax cuts for the rich' being good for the economy bullcrap.

[Masacree]

Unk is right about everything, as per usual.

[roflmao]

It's interesting when we hit 7% (now 9%, which btw is what France loves hovering at, no wonder the french are on strike every other day) unemployment America enters recession, yet this is the standard rate of unemployment pretty much all of Europe has had for ages.

We drive technological innovation which you just happen to enjoy because America doesn't have ridiculous restrictions creating entry-level barriers to the market. Entry-level barriers help huge corporations and prevent smaller businesses from growing which is why we have way more startups than you do. The average amount of time it takes to get a business up and running in Britain is a month. In the US, it is under a week and in some states even a day. Europeans might come up with great ideas, but if you want to actually commercialize and bring a product to the market, you do so in the US.

We're the most productive nation (per capita) in the world and enjoy a dynamic job market that destroys and creates thousands of jobs each month. This is why everyone wants to immigrate to the US, because they know that in the US, immigrants stand a chance of securing a job, since there aren't as many job protection laws that prevent people from being fired, which, by the way, increases our 'poverty rates' but for a good reason.

You do realise the European Union, and not the United States, is the world's largest provider of international aid, right?

Like your other statistics, largely misleading, since you're not considering NGO's. America is by far and large the largest giver, we just don't do it through our government.

You're right about life expectancy, but that's largely because we are fat, don't exercise and have higher rates of suicide and murder. And yes, our healthcare system does suck.

I also agree on military. We spend waaay too much on our military.
---
The idea that 'deregulation' was the cause of our financial collapse is a pretty big overgeneralization. It's not about more or less "regulation", what matters is the quality of the regulation you do have. Poorly designed rating agencies with all the wrong incentives in place, moral hazards and over-leverage is what allowed for banks to take on insane risk and not give a shit about driving their corporations (and the U.S. economy along the way) into the ground. From a business perspective all the toxic loans and assets they took on was really fucking stupid, but they didn't care because as long as they were declared 'too big to fail' the government would just step in and rescue them! yay! Enormous short-term profit without any of the long-term risks.

Where I do think we needed more regulation is with leverage. Banks should not be allowed to leverage at a 1:30 ratio, that's insane and ridiculous. But then once again if the rating agencies did their job deregulated leverage wouldn't have been as much of an issue.

[Demon767]

Roflmao, unknown wasnt arguing that America isnt any less important then it was before, we know how America has benefited Western nations. He was stating that there is no shame in becoming weaker, which is what America is becoming.

[roflmao]

I wholeheartedly agree with that. I don't care at all about America being "number one." That's such a meaningless statement.

The idea that one country could be "number one" is entirely ludicrous. There is no such thing as 'number one', that's nonsense. America is best at some areas and not nearly as good (healthcare) as european countries in other areas.

What I was defending is what makes America unique: the nation's dynamism. In terms of 'opportunity', I definitely think America is 'number one' and I would be sad to see that aspect of America fade away, which is why my post largely was centered around startups, immigration and the job market. I'll admit that my original post was a little pretentious, but so is the title of the tread.

[RoyalHants]

I swear the only on topic threads are  the ones about politics and not balance 

[Hicks58]

...This calls for a derailment!

[TheIcelandicManiac]

wow 6 pages of people talking about politics, sounds like being on a mass leftist rally 

[nugnugx]

I swear the only on topic threads are  the ones about politics and not balance  

Because politics is already offtopic in itself and requires bullshit recreationists which this forum have plenty.

On the other hand balance requires hard facts which few can present as opposed to politics.

[Demon767]

Let the pornography begin!