The Situation Today

Overview

The situation in America today is unsustainable from a long-term perspective.  In this section, I have outlined my rationale for making this statement, that rationale being expressed in four categories.  They will be very briefly described here.  Links to the associated pages under this major heading appear in Links To These Pages below. Additional detail in each subject area can be found by following those links.

Dysfunctional Government

Despite the existence of fluctuating “power” and “control” situations within the past eight years spanning four election cycles, our government is basically ineffective.  The current situation has structural problems that will remain in place until there is either a major shift toward a veto-proof majority for one party or the other in both houses or a president of the same party as the one having smaller majorities in both houses.  Our government is as fragmented and polarized as I can ever recall it being. “Dysfunctional” is a very good way to describe it.

Unsustainable Fiscal Path

Any person who is reasonably responsible from a fiscal perspective can see that the current fiscal situation in this country is unsustainable.  This section explains why this is true.  A graphic representation that is a part of that explanation is an excellent example of the old axiom “One picture is worth a thousand words” — one need not be an economist or a mathematician to look at a graph like that and understand that, whatever is being plotted on the vertical axis, the trend over time is unsustainable.  The bottom line is that we will become like Greece [et al] if we don’t get our fiscal house in order.  It’s not a matter of if — only of when.

Declining World Stature

Practically from the day Barack Obama took office, the stature of the United States on the world stage has been declining.  From his “apology tour”,  to bowing to kings of Muslim nations, to drawing “red lines” only to simply back away when the red lines were clearly and openly crossed, to standing by and watching U. S. soldiers humiliated on world-wide television broadcasts, to doing nothing when Russia flew several times within 100 feet of a U. S. aircraft carrier in international waters, to doing nothing to stand up against clearly provocative saber-rattling actions by China in the the South China Sea, to announcing troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan [including numbers and dates], to “giving up the store and the keys to the warehouse next door” to get the Iran Nuclear Arms “deal” signed off, to subsequently watching Iran engage in clearly “in your face” acts of defiance and their political and spiritual leaders not only condone but personally engage in “Death to America” chants and references to us as “The Great Satan”, to snubbing his nose at Israel … Probably more damaging to our reputation than anything, he has simply refused on multiple fronts to take the kind of leadership role for which America has always been known.  Some media news/commentary hosts and contributors have summed it up well by saying “Our enemies don’t fear us, and our friends don’t trust us”.

Loss Of A Common Value System

Most if not all of the problems we face as a nation are rooted here — loss of a common value system.  As with other pages in this site, explaining that loss concisely is not possible. Our departure from what was originally a common value system has been in progress for a very long time — some [including some of our Founding Fathers] would say, since the very birth of our nation.  Without getting too technical and letting my minor in Mathematics dominate my explanation of the point, let me just say that when there is no absolute standard, there is no standard — and that Statistics theory in its simplest form demonstrates this clearly [a brief quantitative explanation is included in a footnote in this section — see link below].  Loss of a common value system has resulted in loss of a sense of national identity, and that in turn has resulted in degeneration into an air of entitlement and a “What’s in it for me?” mindset.  Millions of people don’t LOVE their country any more — they LOVE their causes; and their country [because, ironically, of the freedoms their predecessors fought and died to provide them] is simply the platform on which they can champion their causes.

Links To These Pages

 

 

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