Weapon sales at record highs, credit card debt soaring through the roof, and drug addiction breaking records: The USA is grappling with seven crises threatening the country.
The political dominance of a figure like Trump is not the cause of America’s problems, but rather its symptom. His angry, uncompromising, and erratic political existence, which sometimes operates in the gray area of the constitution, is an expression of American confusion.
The worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened to the country: It is experiencing a 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 great difficulty for the United States.
1. The State’s Credit Addiction
The USA’s debt brake is not holding. The limit for borrowing has been adjusted by Congress 78 times since 1960. 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. Regardless of who is in power: Enough is never enough, which is why the American state as a whole had to raise one trillion dollars for interest payments in 2023.
2. Citizens’ Credit Addiction
Citizens are no better than their state. Savings have reached an all-time low in 2023, and credit card debt has reached an all-time high. The economic upswing, driven by borrowing by the state and private individuals, is the best upswing that money can buy.
3. Silent Invasion of Chinese Imports
Cheap goods from state-subsidized factories in China are flooding the American market and harming American industry 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, as Trump had done before.
4. Continued CO2 Excess
The US economy, despite all showcase investments in alternative energy generation, is dependent on fossil fuels. In fear of extortion by the OPEC cartel, domestic oil production has been moved to the center of the national security strategy – with the result that private households and industry are now the world’s second largest CO2 emitters after China.
5. Drug Addiction at Record Levels
America has become the largest consumer of the global drug industry, nowhere else do so many people die of an overdose. Heroin has now been replaced by fentanyl – a synthetic opioid, 100 times more potent than morphine and significantly cheaper. The “War on Drugs” launched under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s ended in unconditional surrender for America.
6. Land of the Gun Nuts
The polarization of the country finds visible expression in the sales figures of the arms industry. Statistically, there are 120 firearms per 100 Americans. In no other country in the world do citizens kill each other in such large numbers. In 2023, 18,854 citizens fell victim to gunshot wounds in the country. That’s 51 gun deaths per day.
7. Making Peace with Even More Weapons
Pax Americana is not a peaceful event, as the term is supposed to make us believe. On six of the seven continents, the generals of the United States Armed Forces stand like Roman proconsuls. The USA invested around 920 billion dollars in the military in 2023. $2,000 per citizen. In comparison: In Germany, military spending per capita is only 800 euros. The “values-based world order” is based not primarily on values, but on weapons.
In conclusion: For the USA, although still the number one economic power, the age of impertinence has begun. The country is being challenged economically, politically and culturally by China. And possibly soon also politically in the Taiwan Strait.
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