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Comment by rank0 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot possibly understand several of your points:

The coup attempt is somehow a GOOD sign for American politics?!

The debt is absolutely an existential threat. The “right hand left hand” BS is directly responsible for the growing wealth gap.

Social security is not sustainable. The default projections are not controversial. Go look it up!

We’re single-handedly financing the war in Ukraine.

The president announced he would defend Taiwan with force but don’t even recognize it as a sovereign nation. The CCP has begun unprecedented military activity around Taiwan. They’re violating their air space on a daily basis probing for weakness. Same as always?! What planet are you on?

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None of these are truly new - even the quarter-baked coup attempt (see FDR times.) As for outrageous debt, that began with the US itself.

Which raises the possibility that we're looking at the nasty part of a regular oscillation.

However. The very low birthrate is genuinely new. Drugs/homelessness not new but astonishingly severe. Steep housing prices due to collusion (vs manufactured homes, housing laws, and more) are a large cause of both.

I don’t understand your argument. Just because times have been bad in the past doesn’t mean that America is “going in the right direction”

Did you read the article?

Also the 6 rounds of QE post 2008 is absolutely %100 unprecedented in US history. We have never ever increased the money supply like this. This activity combined with an abundance of cheap credit is what’s creating bubbles in housing, equities and other assets.

So I've said there's decline, but that might be temporary, then given reasons why it might not be temporary. Are you even sure we disagree?

QE is a very recent invention. Inflation, such as during the Civil War, not at all. The money supply went full bonkers - and during the revolution itself; much worse, still. A "Continental" (the dollar of the time) came to mean "worthless."

> We’re single-handedly financing the war in Ukraine.

Single handedly helping a country defend itself from an invader that is attempting to eradicate it.

Yes, much of this is bad.

But none of it is new or unique.

So what? I still argue the US is not headed in a good direction even if we assume nothing novel is happening.

We’re discussing the article right?

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