Despite having a Nobel laureate as president, it is hard not to feel that that the United States is in a state of decline.Every news item seems to be another nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism. Can it be that the the experiment that started with The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution is coming to an end, and that democracy and free markets lost? Is our position as a superpower coming to an end? Is the American dollar to be discarded as the reserve currency of the world? Many feel that the answer to these questions is yes. Yet, others believe that this is just another bump on the road, just like the many we hit over the last decades.
For the best arguments on the subject, we have two excellent articles. The first, Decline Is a Choice, by Charles Krauthammer, who has emerged as the intellectual voice of the Conservative movement, and the other, The Default Power, by Josef Joffe, Co-Editor of Die Zeit, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The articles are free at the Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs websites. If you have problems with the links, you may need to register. Registration is free.
2 comments:
Two-thirds of the USA’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928.
As long as this kind of fact remains true the USA is very likely to continue to hurtle downward on any measure you can think of.
This is a point a take-up in my blog at:
http://www.bretthetherington.net/Modules/Blog/Pages/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogEntryId=397
Brett: The US economy is not a pizza pie that when one eats an extra slice the other goes hungry. Furthermore, I take studies by the CBPP with a grain of salt.
If tomorrow you confiscated all the wealth of the top 1% all you would achieve is having more poor people, without improving the lives of the lower strata. Give me trickle down any day. With all its faults, there is no better system.
Hope you keep visiting my site.
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