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Is the US doomed?
MKR
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Food banks can only help so many, and millions of people don't get enough food, and can barely pay their bills. Millions of people are out of work, and we're years away from being close to meeting it, with more people looking for jobs every day.
Current tax rates can't support the things our society has collectively decided are essential for a fair, safe, and productive civilization (like interstates, a professional military, and a social safety net).
People can only be squeezed for so much productivity before they snap.
We've been spiraling down for decades. Bush's presidency only expedited the process, and one of the two viable parties keeps shedding off pragmatists in favor of extremists.
Do you see a way out, or are we screwed?
Current tax rates can't support the things our society has collectively decided are essential for a fair, safe, and productive civilization (like interstates, a professional military, and a social safety net).
People can only be squeezed for so much productivity before they snap.
We've been spiraling down for decades. Bush's presidency only expedited the process, and one of the two viable parties keeps shedding off pragmatists in favor of extremists.
Do you see a way out, or are we screwed?
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Phone it in.
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Because even a very bad scenario sees the US returning to the quality of life of the, say, 1980s, which would be bad but not quite doomed.
As in collapse. I know you posted some level of analysis to reach the 1980s thing in the economics thread, but I couldn't find it.
I bet they'd like to hear more about how socialist public programs and high tax rates are going to cause the collapse of the United States.
Is it really that ambiguous a term? I mean the collapse of government and a change to another.
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Apparently I'm bad at making threads.
That will not happen unless people become astronomically less comfortable than they currently are.
Right now, despite the poverty and recession and unemployment, people are currently RIDICULOUSLY more comfortable than say, the 1930's, and the country didn't collapse then.
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A tiny portion of the country enjoys that level of comfort. The rest live paycheck to paycheck, and some can't even manage that.
I think we're seeing the continued power of the rich combined with a dwindling rural, white population that is terrified of their oncoming irrelevance.
If we can get over that hump, we should be fine.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Oh, that. I can't find it either, but my approach there was very simple - posit a problem of the magnitude of Argentina's 1999 crisis and presume that the US would lose a similar % of GDP, then look at a US RGDP growth chart and see where the US was last at that % of current RGDP.
Argentina did have regions of wholesale collapse in government services, 25% (i.e., Depression-level) unemployment, etc. I presume everyone has already read the anecdotes of children who go to school but can't concentrate because they were too hungry and hadn't eaten that day. Or the day before. The situation got very bad in some places. So all that chaos and more, provoked by deflationary shock. But long-run growth is determined by fundamentals, which were strong in Argentina and are undeniably strong in the US, regardless of excessive deficit spending, which implies a fairly rapid bounceback in growth.
Welfare entitlements would likely be defaulted upon in such a scenario, of course.
And despite internet rhetoric, nobody other than a small bunch of whackjobs is interested in overthrowing the government.
We'll muddle through. This country survived the Civil War, Great Depression and WWII.
Rigorous Scholarship
If you mean the 1980s, that'd be a remarkable improvement for most of the working class, at least in terms of standard of living and job availability.
If you mean the 1880s, then that'd be what I call a "very bad scenario".
You understand that during the great depression there were grocery stores with no food, yes?
We're not anywhere close to that. Our economic infrastructure is stable. There isn't going to be a crisis of resources without a fantastically large breakdown.
The way I see it, all we're in for in a major tax hike coupled with austerity measures in the next decade.
Collapse would only occur if people simply could not get essentials. As in, they become completely unavailable and business shuts down.
We're a long way from that since the credit markets stabilized.
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In the next 20-40 years, there will be a financial reckoning. Some of the social services we like so much will be paired back. The poor will suffer. Rather than pursue reasonable alternatives, needlessly large cuts will occur to SS and Medicare. The tax structure will probably be different, with fewer deductions. Republican will likely be forced to accept a VAT.
Look, you may think things are horrible and that we're doomed, but when confronted with a serious crisis, even the republicans will do what it takes. Bush said he had to "destroy capitalism to save it" when he and most every member of his crazy party (I'm looking at you Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the rest who like to scream about socialism and pretend to be deficit hawks) enacted TARP. Yes, we're going through hard times now. But unemployment is isolated to them (i.e. not the rich, powerful and connected). So Repubs and some Dems don't care - or rather the Dems either agree with the Republicans or are too cowardly to defend their positions. When things get bad enough that everyone is or could be affected, then they'll get serious. Until then, it's culture-war rabble-rousing and tax cuts for the rich.
Basically: we're not doomed. America has tough choices ahead, but eventually they'll be made. You'll be fine unless you're poor or you have any empathy for the poor.
Rigorous Scholarship
Of those three things generally the first is a tiny fraction of federal expenditures, the second is 20% and the third is 40%.
Pie chartf rom wikipedia,
And Social Security & Medicare expenditures are going to rise dramatically over the next few decades. If you're going to preach doom and gloom (which I think is insane, btw, but whatever) then that's where the problem lays. And yet we've got another thread in these forums advocating a "Guaranteed Basic Income" that would take "only" 1/5 of our GDP to finance.
But no, to answer your question the US is not going to collapse. I love how the theories behind this crap just change to fit whatever is the most convenient current theory. Had the Soviets for a long time, Japan for a while starting in the 80's, lots of talk of a red vs blue civil war after the 2001 election and lots of China talk leading up to the Bejing Olympics.
So I guess "economic collapse" while we're in a recession makes sense. It's still crazy, of course.
its not easy to create demand in a shit economy
whereas you can control the money supply pretty easily
... seriously? The 1980s, the height of the Volcker-induced disinflation and all the associated unemployment? The unemployment rate then beat 10%, you know. The current bout of unemployment hasn't even gotten that high yet.
I'd like to believe that fundamentals are strong in the US, but I think our economy is over-reliant on oil, and I believe in peak oil theory. Right now I think the long-term fundamentals in the US are very weak.
Two points:
- you can make a case that social programs are essential to those at the bottom of the ladder, and thus defaulting on these entitlements will provoke revolution. For the sake of argument. But social programs in the US aren't like that; SS spends generously on the middle and rich and Medicare even more so, and those will get the axe to save the programs. The middle before the rich, if you are pessimistic.
- the US has a clearly defined legal mechanism for defaulting on welfare obligations, and so there will be no collapse in government. Shutdown, rather.
Remember that the Republican Party really, really loves itself its Medicare, so wholesale shutdown is unlikely, even if they miraculously seize whatever parts of government they want.
And they vote, so.
IIRC, it's not even complete shutdown. Rather welfare payments are reduced to tax receipts earmarked for them. Correct me, if I'm wrong.
Deflationary spiral would be bad, see Japan. But that scenario is not DOOMED bad. Just bad. Very unlikely, but worse for us, would be a default on our public debt in another 25 years or so. Still not DOOMED, but much much worse.
The only DOOMED scenario for the US I see would be a sudden end to cheap oil. Considering our current pop density/sprawl, we'd be looking at a crazy expensive adjustment. Then again, expensive oil would lead to very expensive food. Since we're one of the top food producers in the world, we might recover quite a bit from that end.
The US would suffer relatively lightly from an oil shock like that, comparatively speaking; not can it only secure more sources via military might (if it got that desperate), it is less reliant on oil than East Asia or Europe. And its northern neighbor has some oil, too, albeit expensive to extract.
Unemployment is the obvious problem right now. We have about 10% unemployment right now, and no industries are on the way to hire new workers. Developing countries like China and India are taking jobs away from us as fast as possible.
Meanwhile, nothing has been done to regulate the financial industry, so another finance bubble/meltdown is almost guaranteed in the next ten years.
The government still can't make up it's mind that climate change is even a real thing; meanwhile the latest projection predict that within the next 50 years, the entire southwestern US will be covered in a giant dustbowl.
The war on terror has completely distracted us from the real threat of loose nuclear material from the breakup of the soviet union. this professor at stanford predicts a 50% chance that a nuclear weapon will be used some time in the next 50 years.
If that doesn't turn out to be the case (i.e. assuming roughly similar elasticities), then the US would be in a relatively stronger position.
I figure a lapse into another Republican Great Depression is likely though. Normally the bust cycle caused by low taxes/deregulation is remedied by higher taxes/redistribution of wealth/stimulus. However, since the 1980's, our trade policy has made it to where a large chunk of any attempted stimulus goes overseas. This gives us no options out of a demand vacuum in the long run. We've been making do over the last 30 years by adding trillions to the debt. Fortunately, budget deficits really arent the big boogeyman its made out to be. While it is problematic, its more a symptom than a problem. However, once that gravy train either cant run anymore or is halted artificially by political unwillingness, then we'll be faced with the bleak, binary option of economic collapse or fixing our trade policy.
Theres not a prior roadmap for how to undo the damage of a long term supply side economics spiral. We may be the first to find out whether or not it can be done.
I'm pretty confident that it will occur in my lifetime (I'm 24 at the moment). Not to sound too much like Paul Kennedy, but I think we'll see something similar to the collapse of the British superpower, albeit slower (depending on our wars at the time). It will be a very bitter pill for the middle and upper class to swallow, but they'll survive, and the nation will too. And there's a chance that many people will be better for it.
... you've managed to cherrypick only the parts of Keynesian econ and assorted non-Keynesian econ that, when squashed together, give a solely anti-trade narrative. Well done; the contortions are amazing. I regret to inform you that the result is not very coherent, though.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
There are plenty of countries that are poorer than Mexico, but that have much less crime.
Industrialized nations tend to deal with their poor by separating them from the rest of society. Paris' suburbs are designed to be easily cut off from the rest of the city by police or the military. If unrest starts to happen in poorer areas, the government in the US will likely respond by basically walling off those areas.
Nonsense. The US is in no danger of deforestation. And the environment in this country is quite good, certainly better than it was even a generation ago.
Rigorous Scholarship
When do we get to start shooting orks?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
That might work for urban areas, but we are going to see a lot more poverty in suburbia.
No.