I'm seriously wondering when/how this thing is going to blow. Debt is such a central part of everything American, and it's completely not sustainable. What's going to happen? Another credit crisis? Revolution? Mass evictions? Nothing?
I'm friends with a cop who has worked in downtown Toronto for over 20 years. He says suicide is "big right now, bigger than you think."
It seems to get steadily worse over time. I believe that the median resident's quality of life in this country is steadily falling in a lot of ways. The things that people used to believe made this country great (e.g. the first half of the 20th century) are today historical anomalies, completely foreign to the ages that came before and after.
The age of American exceptionalism is over and it's turning into just another place where everyone's backward and suffering.
Look, all across Europe there are economic problems, but America (and to a lesser extent the UK) is the only country that's actually just scrapping large parts of its own landmass into Third World substates.
The next most likely thing is another economic crisis, perhaps triggered by an oil crisis. Another war in the middle east, or cutting off the supply from Russia to Europe. Or the discovery that fracking decline rates are higher than expected.
Continued "Detroitization" is also likely - not collapse but a slow, painful decline into large areas of poverty and dysfunctionality.