Yes, it is a big deal. We're in troubling economic times. Is there a lot of reason to be enthusiastic about the economy right now? Not really, but there's absolutely no reason to look at what's going on and deliver the eulogy for America.
"And yes, I lived through the 70's"
Were you this emotionally distraught during the 1970s and early 1980s? During Watergate, when the entire foundation of the American form of Government seemed to be crumbling?
When Arab nations shut off the oil taps not once, but twice?
When the United States was an international laughing stock because we couldn't even figure out how to deal with a bunch of students in a backwater third world nation who took a bunch of our citizens hostage?
Did the Republic come crashing down during the massive social upheaval of the late 1960s and into the 1970s, what with domestic terrorism and National Guard troops killing students at Kent State?
When inflation was approaching 10%?
When unemployment broke through 10% nationally, and in some parts of the country, with the collapse of the steel and partial collapse of the coal industries, hit as high as 90%?
When some of the supposedly best and brightest minds in Government and Academia were ready to place the tombstone on the American dream and American standing both at home and abroad, and were looking at the Soviet Union as the new trend and rule setter?
No?
Yep, that's right. You managed your way through those situations, painful as it might have been, and prospered, or at least made it this far. You apparently paid off your land at 14% interest. Catastrophic end of the world? Nope, money out of your pocket. Nothing more.
Things are ALWAYS "different" this time.
The supposed "factors" that you cite as new, ominous, and which will apparently result in the catastrophic collapse of the nation are also nothing new.
During the 1930s foreign investment in this country was, proportionally, not far off what it is now. At the height of the depression unemployment was 25%. The creation of the social services state under Roosevelt resulted in MASSIVE deficits at a time when tax revenues were plummeting and the GDP was contracting faster than anything seen in history, hundreds of thousands were thrown out of their homes and off their land by foreclosure, resulting in the largest peace-time migration in American history, and yet somehow the Republic survived.
"there are a LOT of folks who agree with me, who have spent thier lives working on this stuff-"
Just as there are a LOT of folks who work on this stuff and who believe the doomsayers and endtimes predictors are wrong.
Know what that means?
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY.
And yet, through it all the Republic has survived. Not unscathed, not unchanged, but it has, oddly enough survived.
I think that's what troubles me worst of all about people of your ilk, the people who just nonchalantly shrug their shoulders and say "well, I guess that's that, we can't do anything, history has us this time, we're screwed."
You look at the problems we're facing as if they are wholly new, wholly perplexing, and wholly insurmountable.
Every generation has had that, and every generation has proven them to be wrong.
Are you going to be wrong this time? I think so. Can I prove that any more than you can definitively prove that this IS the demise of America's economy, influence, and everything else? No.
But I like to think that the American traits of innovation, invention, reinvention, and incorporation haven't totally been stripped from the fabric of the nation like you apparently believe they have been.
I also like to think that far more Americans actually are willing to see a bright future and work towards it rather than spend their time wallowing in fear and defeatism and working as hard as they can to bring that dark view to life.
Simply put, then, anyone can make any predictions that they want about the future based on a discrete set of factors that exist at that time. Americans have been doing that, and predicting the collapse of America and the American way of life.
But so far?
They're 0 of everything, and given different situations that this country has faced in the past, they're going to continue to be 0 for everything.
So, I'll say it again. Stop screaming doom and gloom and rubbing your hands in glee at the prospects. Should you be concerned? Yes. Express your concern, but get out of the doom, gloom, self pity and blase acceptance pit that you all have seem to have jumped into.
It's almost perverse the joy that some people take in predicting that this is the end of all.
