Gun sales at record highs, credit card debts skyrocketing, and drug addiction at record highs: the United States is battling seven crises that threaten the country.
The political dominance of a figure like Trump is not the cause of America’s problems, but rather their symptom. His angry, unforgiving and erratic political existence, which sometimes operates in the gray area of the Constitution, is an expression of an American confusion.
The worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened to the country: it is experiencing relative decline compared to the rising world power China. The “American way of life” has become a metaphor for suffering in the present. There are seven diseases whose simultaneous occurrence is causing severe problems for the United States.
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The US government debt brake is not holding. The limit on borrowing has been adjusted by Congress 78 times since 1960. 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. No matter who is in power: enough is never enough, which is why the American government as a whole had to raise a trillion dollars in interest payments for the first time in 2023.
Citizens are no better than their state. Savings balances will have reached their all-time low and credit card debt will have reached their all-time high in 2023. The economic recovery – driven by government and private borrowing – is the best recovery that money can buy.
Cheap goods from government-subsidized factories in China are flooding the American market and hurting American industries from Pennsylvania to California. “It’s not competition, it’s cheating,” says Joe Biden, who is in the middle of the election campaign and has drastically raised tariffs on goods from the Middle Kingdom – like Trump before him.
Despite all the flagship investments in alternative energy production, the US economy is dependent on fossil fuels. In fear of blackmail from the OPEC cartel, the country’s own oil production has been moved to the center of the national security strategy – with the result that private households and industry are now by far the largest CO2 emitters in the world behind China.
America has become the largest consumer of the global drug industry, and nowhere else do so many people die of overdoses. Heroin has now been replaced by fentanyl – a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than morphine and significantly cheaper. The “War on Drugs” that began under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s ended with unconditional surrender for America.
The polarization of the country is clearly reflected in the arms industry’s sales figures. Statistically, there are 120 firearms for every 100 Americans. In no other country in the world do their own citizens kill themselves in such numbers. In 2023, 18,854 nationals died from a gunshot wound. That’s 51 gun deaths a day.
Pax Americana is not a peaceful event, as the term would have us believe. On six of seven continents, the generals of the United States Armed Forces are like the Roman proconsuls. The USA will have invested around $920 billion in the military in 2023. Each citizen receives $2.00. For comparison: In Germany, military spending per capita is only 800 euros. The “values-oriented world order” is not based primarily on values, but on weapons.
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Conclusion: For the USA, although still the number one economic power, the age of unreasonableness has begun. The country is being challenged economically, politically and culturally by China. And in the Taiwan Strait possibly soon also politically.