It has worked to this point, but past returns are not guarantee of future returns. On other hand well both political parties really enjoy line going up, so even if it leads to inevitable destruction lot will be done to keep it going up.
Take all your life savings into a savings account? Well, you could lose it all if the FDIC and your bank collapse.
Take it all into cash under your basement? You are gambling that you won't have a house fire, that you won't be robbed, etc.
Keeping US dollars at all is gambling that the US dollar retains value - there are plenty of examples of currencies completely collapsing.
i was very much infatuated by the idea of total reliability on a global scale and couldn't wait to talk about the CAP theorem with anyone who would listen. Read much of the research. I still love to flip through Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann occasionally.
As I was learning about said company's server racks there was a component that I asked an engineer on my team about – "Isn't that a single point of failure?"
He looked at me, exhausted and stressed out, and just said "Take it far enough, the Earth is a single point of failure."
I got the point.