What is America’s real condition?

There is an old saying that the optimist sees the glass half full, while the pessimist see it as half empty (an engineer sees the wrong size glass). That seems to be the case in this election.

In truth, the biggest difference between supporters of Clinton and supporters of Trump is their estimate of how well America is doing. Hillary supporters think America is doing great and we just need to keep doing what we have been doing for the past eight years.  Trump supporters think America is in trouble and we really need to change some things. So which view is correct?

Well, certainly America remains for the moment the world’s economic powerhouse. While the economies of Europe, China and Russia are in trouble, the American economy, even at its current slow pace of recovery, is the one global bright spot. And the American military remains far and away the most powerful in the world, at least on paper. American productivity, as ranked recently by tech company PGI, ranks third in the world, behind Germany (first) and France (second) – not too shabby, but a decline from recent decades. The World Intellectual Property Organization ranks America first in number of patents granted worldwide (27.9% in 2013), though Japan and China are rapidly catching us.

If you are a liberal (though not necessarily a Hillary fan), this supports your belief that Obama’s eight years in office have been at least satisfactory, if not outstanding.

On the other hand the Obama administration added $6.5 trillion dollars to the national debt over seven years, a 56% increase (the Bush administration added 10%, the Clinton administration added 32%).  That national debt (including foreign debt), according to the IMF, now stands at 104.5% of GDP, which is generally considered to be well into the danger zone for any economy.  In education, against other industrialized nations, our secondary students rank 16th in science and 23^rd in math, not very good considering we spend more money per student than all but four other nations (Austria, Luxemburg, Norway and Switzerland).  The US murder rate overall isn’t too bad (5 per 100,000 vs a world average of 4.7 per 100,000), but for African Americans it is astronomical (19.1 per 100,000, and most of them committed by other African Americans). Chicago has passed 500 murders so far this year. Wage inequality has been rising steadily for the past 35 years, with the top 10% getting most of the increases in recent years. And while our military is the strongest in the world on paper, we are flying 50 year old B52 bombers and 44 year old KC-135 tankers, sailing 38 year old submarines, and our underground nuclear missile silos still use floppy disks in their computers.

Beyond that, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked, and as all the recently leaked emails reveal, the Washington political system (including the media, and apparently even the FBI) has become seriously corrupted.

If you are not a liberal (though not necessarily a Trump fan), this supports your belief that things need to change.

A useful article to read in this regard is Victor David Hanson’s American Civilization Paralysis. Hanson is a classical scholar, and he sees parallels between the decline of past great empires and America today.  Empires, he argues, decline when they can no longer bring themselves to reform and make the changes they need to make to survive – it is simply easier to keep the status quo than to make painful but necessary adjustments.  Have we reached that stage?

In general, I think America needs to make some (often painful) changes to prevent or reverse the decline – cut government spending, increase taxes, make rational if painful decisions about our priorities (infrastructure repair may be more important than some social programs), reform the political system (such as eliminating gerrymandering).  That doesn’t mean I think Trump is the one to lead this (I don’t), but it does mean I don’t think Clinton’s “more of the same” approach is right either.