Are We Witnessing The Decline And Fall Of The American Non-Empire?
September 8, 2009 / 2:13 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierAmerica, as Bill Whittle so eloquently pointed out, is not, and never has been an Empire builder. Still, America has been a world-power since almost her inception over 200 years ago. Is it over?
Today, we learn that America lost to the Swiss as the world’s most competitive economy.
Consider, too, MaxedOutMama’s take on unemployment (read the whole thing):
At this point one must interpret a bit. One could, if one were to be polemical, argue that the self-employed worker expansion means that the economy is improving so much that contracting jobs are easier to get and highly lucrative. However, I find that completely implausible in view of the massive drop in wage and salary employment, which has never in our experience been a sign of an improving economy. If wage and salary employment were stabilizing, one might indeed expect to see casual contracting picking up, and indeed, at some point this will happen. Companies are extremely loathe to hire in first stages of economic recoveries.
Instead, what I think we are seeing is the first group of long-term unemployed who are losing unemployment benefits and scratching a living. You only have to be employed one hour of one day of the reference week in order to be classified as employed.
A further comment about the government employment – because of the steadiness of government entities, these numbers are generally pretty reliable in both surveys. It is, however, a rather large drop in view of expanded federal employment, especially the census workers, and likely indicates the depth of the state and local combined tax/retirement problem. The combined impact will only increase for years to come.
So, I wonder what you think. Is America going through a downward cycle or is the downward economic trend spelling doom? Is America declining and diminishing, never to rise again? As a cultural, economic, political and military influence, is America over?
One Response to “Are We Witnessing The Decline And Fall Of The American Non-Empire?”
September 8 2009 / 3:33 pm
Reply
I do not think we will become a third class country or anything, but we are loosing our Super Power status, or at least the Only Super Power Status. With both China and India coming on strong we and many European countries coming out of their recessions w/o Simulii packages, we are going to be in debt for a long time while these other countries have not spend their children’s money like we have. This will hurt our economy for a long time to come, just like we had to get out of the Carter economy,which we never really got out of in my estimation. Hell, we are still in the FDR economy.
Make no mistake this did not happen over night with Obama winning the White House. The house of cards has been a long time coming. The sad thing is, Obama is doing the same mistakes FDR did to make the Depression worse than it needed to be.
I just hope enough of the So-Called Blue Dogs can reign in the spending, because the Republicans can not do anything until 2012 or later