I compiled my thoughts on the primary challenges the United States faces in the coming decade, and ways to overcome them, here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/facingthefuture.pdf

The primary focus in this collection is on domestic challenges, although some geopolitical issues are addressed.

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As part of our effort to reintegrate into American society and its culture, we’re spending part of our summer in the air conditioned retreat of the Paramount, a faithfully restored theater originally built in 1915 to host vaudeville as the Majestic and transformed in 1930 into a Baroque Revival movie palace, its present form.

The theater provides a retreat from both the heat and day-to-day reality into the bygone eras of Hollywood and foreign film classics. The films are replete with villains and heroes defined by art direction, staging and dialog that shorthands races, roles, conflicts, attitudes and passions into nifty set-piece scenes. This foreshortening of life’s challenges and irresolvable conflicts into tightly packaged, neatly wrapped, emotionally digestible, bite sized chunks contrasts with later eras’ films that showcased, if not celebrated, the irredeemable flaws of humanity on individual, societal, planetary and galactic scales. This latter film genre, while undoubtedly more accurate and reflective of the true nature of life, is much more challenging material, and over time often leads to a retreat into the simpler, soft-focus, one-way pursuit of the nostalgia of a “simpler time.”

As tempting as the seductive, simple packaging of human and national characteristics in film classics can be, they can also serve as a useful lens through which to view our modern world. For instance, this weekend’s fare included the celebrated artistic convergence of producer / director Elia Kazan and a troupe of talented actors, writers, composers, cinematographers, art directors and production professionals: 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire and 1954’s On The Waterfront.

Since I often retain an outside-looking-in perspective on the U.S., I sometimes derive different views of cultural artifacts than others around me here in the United States. Consequently, the primary roles in the two films, viewed back-to-back as a double feature, couldn’t help but jump out at me as parallels of the roles the United States is often cast in by the various countries on the geopolitical scene where we’ve spent time during the last decade.

The world’s rapidly developing economies, such as Brazil and Russia, as well as the merely developing nations, often see the U.S. as Father Barry, the righteous priest, constantly goading others to do the right thing, as he defines it. At best, the developing nations  emphasize Father Barry’s courageous stand for virtue, freedom, honesty and integrity. At worst, they note that their labors in brutal conditions enable Father Barry’s institution its power, position and wealth.

Western Europe often casts the United States as Stanley Kowalski, the crude brute, ruled by his adolescent emotions, too immature for his physical strength, capable of little beyond browbeating, manipulation and abuse. Unequipped to rise beyond his commonness, he surrounds himself with equally low-life immigrants and rejects the only example of higher breeding, culture and lofty education he encounters.

Bombastic socialists, such as Hugo Chavez, popularize the identity of America as Johnny Friendly, the corrupt mob boss who rules his domain with an iron fist, brutally subjugating the masses through intimidation, economic marginalization, violence and death, while he and his henchmen wallow in wealth and power.

Other nations in Latin America are more nuanced in their casting of America as mobster. The rest of the region puts the United States in the role of The Boss of Bosses, who makes but a brief cameo appearance as the puppeteer behind the Johnny Friendlys of the world. In their view, America as The Boss of Bosses silently and mysteriously pulls the strings that control economies, rainfall and whether or not you have a flat tire on the way to work today through the omniscient, omnipresent and omni-powerful CIA.

Islamists portray the United States as Stella Kowalski, debauched and decadent, wife of Satan himself, ready and willing to bring forth further generations of depraved, bestial, godless Stanleys to further pollute the world. Stella, unable to resist the sinful allure of Stanley’s Satan, legitimizes all that is unclean and unholy and therefore has no place in a sanctified realm.

China and other nations, tribes and individuals vested in the current century’s geopolitical realities place the United States solidly in the starring role of Blanche DuBois. Blanche, born into unimaginable wealth, power and prestige, joined her forbears in squandering her remaining wealth. Relevant only in her own fantasy world, trapped in addiction and unable to face reality, she ends in a downward spiral of decay, denial and collapse.

People who view the United States in a positive light, and there are many more of them out there than the two dominant world-view narratives extant in America allow to be known, tend to cast the United States as Terry Malloy. Sure, Terry is simple minded, and he’s made some mistakes by choosing the wrong friends and being overly loyal to people he thought he could trust; but, then again, his is loyal and he is trusting and he is a guy who is willing to fight for, and lay his life on the line for, what he believes in. In fact, if Terry believes in you, he’ll lay his life on the line for you as well. Terrys are very rare on the geopolitical scene.

If Americans picked a role for the United States, they might pick good-hearted Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, who perhaps too late realizes he can’t go it alone and needs a partner, narrowly avoids being hoodwinked by a wily deceiver, but in the end stands up for his values and rejects his suitor as unworthy. That would be a fairly subtle reading of the role as applied to the United States, and Mitch is difficult to see as purely heroic.

Consequently, most Americans would probably also pick Terry Malloy, the closest role to purely heroic outside of the courageous, saintly Edie Doyle.

In the Hollywood ending to the movie On The Waterfront, Terry Malloy rises from his pummeling by Johnny Friendly’s gang, shakes off his injuries and triumphantly leads the newly independent dockworkers into a fresh, cleansed-of-past-sins era (cue swelling music in the Leonard Bernstein score).

In Budd Schulberg’s original screenplay and his subsequent novel version of the story, Terry Malloy is brutally murdered by the mob, the realpolitik power of the docks.

Only time will tell what role best suits the United States. And which ending will apply.

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A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete 

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On The Waterfront (1954)

Cast (in credits order) verified as complete 

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Sources:

Paramount Theater
History: http://www.austintheatre.org/site/PageNavigator/venues/paramount/history
Films: http://www.austintheatre.org/site/PageNavigator/shows_events/films

A Streetcar Named Desire
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044081/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Streetcar_Named_Desire_(1951_film)

On The Waterfront
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047296/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_waterfront

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It’s often quoted folk-wisdom that climbing stairs adds years to your life. That’s interesting, since the goal of human civilization, once past the creation of the civilization itself and aside from war, has largely been the elimination of all possible effort associated with life.

From elevators to Google search, anything that eliminates effort is rewarded; from rotary dial phones to manual crank car windows, anything that adds effort is penalized. Day by day, year by year, more and more effort is removed from life, leaving more and more effortless life, more and more elevator rides through existence.

Is there a price to pay for that?

Does having a few staircases to climb every day add the level of striving and exertion required for humans to be healthy, both mentally and physically?

What about on a societal scale?

When societies have no major challenges to overcome, no credible common goal they are collectively striving to achieve, no literal or figurative staircase to climb, they inevitably disintegrate.

How many staircases can we eliminate before we as individuals, and collectively as a society, lose what we need to be healthy and stay alive?

Have we already collectively moved out of our 4th floor walkup? And, if so, how much longer before the effects overwhelm us?

Asked another way, if we’re no longer climbing the stairs of individual and collective challenge, are we instead fat, happy and riding the elevator, merely waiting to get off at a higher floor, unprepared for what awaits us? Or, are we instead hurtling down the elevator shaft to the depths below, blissfully unaware we’ve traded what we need to survive and thrive as individuals and as a society for the ease of an effort- free, ignorance-is-bliss, abbreviated existence?

The entrepreneur who told me of his father is 83. He’s looking for another startup. He wants to be climbing stairs. He wants a 4th floor walkup.

Which are you looking for: the stairs or the elevator?

Which is your country looking for?

The core of the story is an individual.

The first unit of human organization is the family.

The next unit of human organization is tribe.

Tribe is the fundamental unit of humans everywhere in the world except the United States. Tribes define the most essential social unit for almost everyone on the planet except for Americans. Tribes don’t exist in the U.S. because the nation is made up of immigrants who mixed together to create the society. Because true tribes do not exist in the U.S., it is nearly impossible for modern Americans to understand tribes and world events that are driven by tribal loyalties and conflicts.

In particular, Americans struggle to understand events in countries that were artificially formed by the colonial European empires, empires that created multitudes of artificial borders and entire countries by whim, thereby dividing ancient tribal lands and forcing disparate tribes, often ancient blood-enemies, into shared artificial nation-states.

From Kashmir to Kurdistan to nearly the entire continent of Africa, where there is trouble, it is almost always traceable back to European colonialism and the wreckage the modern world has inherited because of it.

The United States, however, avoided this trouble. From the beginning of the nation, aside from the remaining native Americans, there was no true tribe in America, so the fundamental groups-of-humans units were simpler and more conducive to a nation state with a strong national identity.

For most of its existence, the United States had a strong sense of overriding nationhood. Americans were Americans, first and foremost, because no tribal loyalties clouded or competed for the people’s identity.

That all started to change when the fundamental building block, the family unit, began to disintegrate in the mid to late 20^th century. As the multi-generational family unit weakened, stratified and crumbled it was replaced by pseudo-tribes.

As the family became less and less a reliable structure in American life, pseudo-tribes filled the very basic human need for identity, status and protection. As pseudo-tribes rose in prominence, the nation state diminished in importance in terms of identity and definition.

Pseudo-tribes, such as gangs, institutions, organizations, brands and technologies came to define Americans’ identity. People self-defined themselves as members of pseudo-tribes first and Americans second, third or a very distant fourth, if at all. For instance, people would commonly identify themselves as “gardener” or “Cubs fan” or “metal head” but you would be hard pressed to find someone who would self-identify first as “American.”

In today’s America, pseudo-tribes have been replaced in dominance by bi-polarization that seeks to separate every single person into two very easily defined types, either us or them.

In today’s world of us, meaning those who “get it,” those who understand, those who are paying attention, those who are aware, those who are tuned in, those who are in touch, and those who are true believers—and them, meaning everyone else—the nation has faded into insignificance.

Although both groups, us and them, regularly trot out the flag and claim exclusive rights to true patriot-hood, they both are merely dressing up in the costumes of Americans. Their vitriolic rants about being the only true patriots, the only true Americans, ring hollow. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it is obvious to any non-aligned observer that it has nothing to do with America; it has only to do with us and them.

It is clear that in today’s world, there are only two entities. The nation has ceased to matter for either polarized group, whose only real purpose is the destruction of the opposing camp.

This leaves the few people outside the warring camps as the only ones who have any sense of nationhood, the only sense of what it used to be like to be Americans before us and them took over.

It remains to be seen if those few who remain outside the warring camps can rebuild the nation after the polarized combatants treat the country as collateral damage in their efforts to annihilate their opponents. At the rate the nation is devolving into partisan warfare, there may not be much left to work with.

While there is little doubt that individual people will survive the conflict, it is unknown if they will be merely individual circles or if the nation will survive to encompass them.

As Europe slowly rebuilt from the ashes of war, the Islamic empires continued their long slumber, India scuffled through its often chaotic early democracy, Latin America swung wildly from far-right to far-left despots and China suffered unspeakable suffering under Maoist extremes, the United States bobbed cheerily along the sunny seas of prosperity.

During this time, the U.S. took on cost after cost, burden after burden, both domestically and internationally. From supporting the world’s largest, most expensive military, to feeding internal parasites that sucked economic vitality like a lamprey eel, America endured all the costs and burdens, yet kept on growing.

Once the Soviet Union fell, the United States stood well and truly alone atop the world, the sole superpower, capable, so the story went, of doing whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted.

During the decades from the end of WWII to the end of the century, the American population came to expect endless growth, ever-increasing prosperity, an always better life for their children and unchallenged global precedence.

Today, just 10 years into the new century, all of those expectations, and all of their accompanying assumptions, are being challenged. America is no longer the unchallenged global leader. America’s world standing and reputation have been severely dented. America’s prosperity has stopped, and in fact reversed, in the most severe downturn since the great depression. For the first time ever in its long history of endless optimism, a majority of Americans think their children will have a worse life than they did. And if that wasn’t enough, America can no longer afford many of the costs and burdens it currently bears financially, socially and politically.

There are many ways to decide what can be done to restore American prosperity and ensure a better life for our children and grandchildren. As a nation and as individuals, we can make those choices by any number of criteria. I believe the way forward consists of a very simple test: we can only keep what we can afford.

As a nation, we can no longer afford:

• Money in Politics

Money has irretrievably corrupted the political process in the United States. Elected representatives are now engaged in full time fund raising from the point they choose to run for office until the point they lose their last election. Actually governing the states and the nation were delegated to staffers and lobbyists long ago. The politicians do one thing and one thing only: pursue money. Nine billion dollars was spent in 2009 buying political influence in Washington, D.C., alone, to say nothing of what was spent at the state and local level.  

Under this system, we elect the people who can demonstrate they can best spend unlimited amounts of money. The more influence they sell, the more money they take in, the more they can spend. We end up with the people who know the least about how to manage money and the most about how to spend it. This fact goes a long way to explaining why our public debt and runaway spending on entitlement programs is destroying the country’s finances and undermining our economic and national stability.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Wouldn’t it be better to elect people who demonstrate they can make the most of a fixed amount of money, a specific budget, very similar to how you run your household—making do on the money you have? This is how other successful industrialized countries run elections. Those countries give each candidate a fixed, specific amount of money and watch to see who can demonstrate they can make best use of that money. They elect people who are the most efficient at using the money they have available.

I believe that is the best way forward for America. We can no longer afford money in politics.

Give each candidate a fixed amount of public money. Outlaw all other money in politics: private, business, union, PAC, special entity, international, etc.

Yes, there will still be crooked politicians. Yes, there will still be individuals, businesses, unions and organizations who buy off politicians. We will still need to arrest and prosecute those people. It will still be better than it is today.

We can’t afford money in politics anymore; it has corrupted our political system. We must eliminate money in politics.

• Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the process of creating distorted electoral districts at the state level to ensure that a particular political party will always win the elections in that district. The resulting rigged elections in American gerrymandered districts are no different than rigged elections in Putin’s Russia, Chávez’s Venezuela, or Communist China. Just as in those places, the winner in an American gerrymandered district has already been determined.

Gerrymandering ensures “safe” districts for one or the other of the two political parties. As long as gerrymandering continues, America is not run by the people, it is run by the political parties.

Gerrymandering means that there is no contest in the November elections, when most voters go to the polls. Instead, the winner of the spring primary elections determines who will win that district. The people that vote in the primary elections are predominantly party activists, extremists and fringe ideologues. Those extremists elect extremist, ideologue candidates. Gerrymandering guarantees that political extremist ideologues will be elected and dominate Congress.

In the 2010 election, 331 of the 435 House seats, 76 percent, are considered “safe” or gerrymandered. Those “safe” seats will go to unyielding ideologues that are incapable of the compromises required for governance. If they compromise with the few remaining moderates in their own party, much less the opposing party, they will lose the next primary election. Gerrymandering guarantees a gridlocked, non-functioning government.

We can’t afford gerrymandering anymore. It has created a Congress filled with extremist ideologues incapable of governance. We must eliminate gerrymandering.

• A Permanent Ruling Class

In exchange for the material and social success of the latter half of the 20^th century, the American people abdicated governance to a fixed, permanent political class. This political class almost all hailed from the same families, neighborhoods, social circles, elite colleges, law schools and informal and formal networks. As long as the prosperity kept flowing and the good times kept rolling, the American people let the ruling political class have their way with running the government and the country. Although elections were held and the token outsider occasionally slipped into office, the same group of people, the ruling political class, ran the show. They were, and are, the undisputed drivers of the American bus.

The inevitable outcome is not unexpected and is reflected of the maxim, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The longer the ruling political class stayed in power, the more the country was shaped to ensure their continued power and economic success.

America was founded by a ruling political class of wealthy, white, male land owners. It remains a political ruling class primarily of wealthy, white men. While only about one in a hundred Americans is a millionaire, more than 44 of every hundred congress members are millionaires. The average net worth of a member of Congress is more than $6.3 million dollars, more than ten times the average net worth of an American citizen. Women make up 51 percent of the U.S. and only 18 percent of Congress. Minorities are 34 percent of the U.S. but only 16 percent of Congress.

The same permanent ruling political class has been running the United States for a long time. Their priorities have put the country exactly where it is right now. No one else is more responsible for where we are as a nation than this small group of people. They can’t point the finger at anyone else—they’ve been driving this bus for generations. Where we are now is nobody’s fault but theirs.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because of birthright. Their parents ruled the United States, so they believe they deserve to rule the United States. The United States was founded on the principal that no one gets anything, least of all political power and control, due to birthright. We fought a war with a ruling King to establish that principal, enshrined in our country’s independence.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because they are elites, residents of the pinnacles of society. They attended all the right schools, they obtained all the right degrees, they worked at all the right places, and they know all the right people. The U.S. is, theoretically, a meritocracy, where people earn their place in life due to their abilities and their efforts. The U.S. is, theoretically, where one can be smart and rise up through society all the way to the top, including positions of political power and control.

The ruling political class thinks they deserve to run the country because they are so smart. Firstly, if they are so smart, how did we end up where we are right now? Secondly, there are plenty of smart people in the United States, of which the vast majority are outside the ruling class.

The permanent ruling political class has been controlling America for generations.

They put us in the position we are now. They had their chance and this is what they made of it.

I believe we should give some other smart Americans an opportunity to drive the bus.

We can’t afford a permanent ruling class anymore. We need a different set of bus drivers.

• A Nation of Lawyers

One negative effect of a fixed, permanent ruling political class is that the United States became more and more a tangled web of laws and regulations that ensured that the ruling political class’s dominant profession, lawyers, were required for even the most trivial engagement with business or society. Fewer than one half of one percent of Americans are lawyers while more than 38 percent of Congress are lawyers. More than half of all presidents, including our current president, have been lawyers. Over its history, the United States slowly but inevitably transitioned to a nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.

The solution does not lie in a Shakespearian outcome, as in, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – Dick, the butcher, Henry VI, part II, act IV, scene ii, lines 83–84.

We need laws. We are, after all, theoretically a country of laws, not men. With no laws, we have no civilization.

We need lawyers to provide service within those laws. We cannot function without lawyers.

In my view, it is wrong to paint all lawyers with a broad brush as the source of all of our problems. Not all lawyers are inherently evil. In fact, one of the people I admire most is a lawyer. Over my career I have worked with many lawyers of very high merit, character and integrity.

The solution is not in a blanket condemnation of lawyers. The solution is in a society that is not run for the ongoing, structurally entwined and integrated, nearly exclusive, benefit of lawyers.

American doctors state that more than 30% of surgeries, testing, procedures and prescriptions in the United States are done due to “defensive” medicine to protect doctors and hospitals from lawsuits. The U.S. spent $2.4 trillion dollars on health care in 2008. You can do the math.

Various studies estimate the overall cost to the U.S. economy due to its excessively litigious environment related to legal liability at 10 to 20 percent. In 2009 the U.S. gross national product was $14.462 trillion. You can do the math.

There was a time when the U.S. economy was so robust and growing so fast that we didn’t notice, much less care, that we were spending 30 dollars out of every hundred of health care costs and 10 to 20 dollars out of every hundred in the entire economy on out of control litigation, or in colloquial terms, on ambulance chasing lawyers.

We are no longer in those times when we didn’t notice and it didn’t matter.

We can no longer afford a country of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers. We must reign in the lawyers and end excessive litigation.

• Foreign Oil

In 2008 the United States sent $1,024,483,750 per day overseas for foreign oil. That’s more than $1 billion dollars—per day—every 24 hours—sent overseas.

That’s one billion dollars a day that could be improving our country and fixing our problems. Instead we sent one billion dollars a day to other countries.

In all of 2008 we sent $373,936,568,750, that’s $374 billion dollars, overseas to buy oil.

Included in that year’s total amount was more than $201billion dollars sent to Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, the countries that make up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Iran is also a member of OPEC, but we don’t currently buy any oil from them due to U.S. economic sanctions.

The nations of OPEC control 76 percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil. The nations of OPEC also enjoy the receipt of $201 billion dollars in oil revenue a year from the United States. That revenue buys power and control for the despots and royal families that control nearly all of the OPEC countries.

In exchange for this extraordinary wealth and the military protection provided by the United States over the oil rich countries of the Middle East, some of those autocrats and royal families have been very friendly and helpful to the U.S.; others have been publicly helpful, but dubious to antagonistic to outright hostile behind the scenes. Some, such as Iran, are openly hostile.

It is alleged that some of the OPEC countries use a portion of their oil income to fund terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, a group committed to the destruction of the United States, its society and its people. Among the OPEC members in our own hemisphere, Hugo Chávez, strongman ruler of Venezuela, has called for the outright destruction of the United States as we know it, while his protégé, Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, a fervent anti-yanqui nationalist, supports him in his efforts while initiating his own.

In 2008, the U.S. sent more than $80 billion dollars to the Persian Gulf oil countries, of which an unknown amount was diverted to people doing everything they can to kill every last American.

In 2008, the U.S. sent more than $40 billion dollars to Hugo Chávez, who leads the world in anti-American zealotry and vitriol, and $7.5 billion dollars to his South American sidekick in America bashing, Rafael Correa.

In addition, in 2008 the U.S. sent more than $15.7 billion dollars to our old Cold War foe and resurgent world power, Russia, to buy their oil.

All told, in 2008 the U.S. sent $143.2 billion dollars to people who in one way or another, to one extent or another, to one degree or another, are trying to kill us.

We are the first civilization in the history of mankind to fund its own destruction.

We can no longer afford to send over one billon dollars a day overseas to buy foreign oil. We can no longer afford to fund our own destruction. We must end our dependence on foreign oil.

• Partisanship

“…it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American” – former Senator Alan Simpson (Republican, Wyoming)

The two American political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, have held power in this country in their present form for over 150 years. For good or for ill, they have created the nation we live in today.

In recent times, thanks to gerrymandering, both parties have drifted towards their respective radical fringes, becoming little more than holding tanks for extremist ideologues. Having lost nearly every moderate member, the parties are no longer capable of finding common ground with each other. The ideologues that control the parties are incapable of seeing the world in any way other than pure black and white. In the view of the extremists, the world is divided between party loyalists who drank the Kool-Aid and will march to any tune the party leadership calls and 100 percent deserve-to-die, evil enemy.

There is little, if any, social interaction between members of the opposing parties in Congress. There is little, if any, meaningful cooperation between members of the opposing parties. There is little, if any, concern for anything other than achieving and retaining power for their party’s sake between members of the opposing parties. There is little, if any, effort put into governing the country they were elected to serve versus extending power and control between members of the opposing parties. 

Protected by their safe, gerrymandered districts, extremist ideologues have seized control of the two political parties that control the United States. These hard-line extremists cannot compromise or they will be voted out in the next primary election, thus they are incapable of anything but hard-line agendas. Since they cannot compromise in any form, by any means, these politicians are not equipped to function in the real world of politics, which is, by definition, the art of the possible, not the realm of the rigid.

Increasingly solidified into distant, opposing camps incapable of communication, much less governance, preoccupied by plotting the downfall of their rivals above all other concerns, the parties have abandoned the helm. The ship of state has been set adrift, free to be blown upon the rocks by the winds of a rapidly changing world and battered into splinters by the crashing waves of our country’s enemies.

The two parties, as they have amply demonstrated over the last decade, are incapable of addressing, much less overcoming, the major threats the country faces, such as the economy, public debt, annual deficits, energy, education, effective financial regulation, health care costs, etc.

Because they are incapable of the compromises required to govern in any form short of a totalitarian dictatorship, the parties have proven themselves unsuited to participation in the representative democracy used in the United States.

The two parties must reform or be replaced. The politicians of the two parties must rediscover that they are not elected to serve their parties, they are elected to serve their constituents, and all of their constituents at that. The two parties must break from their current operating credo of “Destroy the other party at all costs, including the country if required,” and return to a mission of being Americans first and party members second.

We need a functioning government. We have serious, existential threats to this country that must be overcome in this decade. We cannot afford gridlock.

We cannot afford the two parties in their current form. Partisanship must be ended. 

• Couch Potatoes

Starting in about 1970, the U.S. food industry enthusiastically adopted High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). They liked it so much they basically stopped using real sugar in processed food and drinks. Until recently, HFCS was the only sweetener used in non-diet soft drinks, e.g. sport drinks, fruit juices, cola, pop, and soda. It is also widely used in other food products such as soups, condiments, deserts, crackers, cereals, etc. In fact, it is often challenging to find a single processed food that does not contain HFCS.

 HFCS is cheaper than sugar and it tastes much sweeter. That was a powerful combination for the food and beverage industry and the American consumer. So powerful, in fact, it proved irresistible.

Consequently, average annual per-capita consumption of HFCS in the U.S. went from zero in 1970 to over 60 pounds (27.22 kilos) today. That means that every single American you know consumes an average of over 60 pounds (27.22 kilos) of HFCS every year.

In 1988 Taco Bell introduced unlimited soda refills and 7-Eleven unveiled the 64 ounce “Double Gulp.” Consumption volume of drinks and other processed foods skyrocketed as a consequence of these and similar “super-size” market offerings.

Since the introduction of HFCS and the “super-sizing” of food and drink portions, obesity in America has more than doubled.

More than one third of adults in the United States are obese.

Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity has tripled among school-age children and adolescents.

More than three in ten American children are overweight or obese.

Health effects of obesity include high blood pressure; diabetes; heart disease; joint problems, including osteoarthritis; sleep apnea and respiratory problems; cancer; metabolic syndrome; and psychosocial effects. Most of these conditions are chronic and can more than double the lifetime cost of health care compared to a non-obese citizen. Long term, obesity nearly doubles the rates of debilitating, high cost chronic diseases and disability.

Due to their poor overall health, and specifically due to high rate of obesity, citizens of the United States face a drop in average life expectancy for the first time in the nation’s modern history.

We can no longer afford a nation of overweight, unhealthy adults and children. We can’t afford the loss of productivity among working adults due to chronic health conditions brought on by poor health. We cannot afford the costs of health care for an unhealthy nation, now, or in the future.

We cannot afford a nation of couch potatoes. Poor health and high obesity rates must end.

• Agriculture Subsidies

The United States spends more than $20 billion dollars per year on farm crop programs, including direct subsidies. However, this amount dramatically understates the total cost of artificial pricing and subsidy programs because it does not include other costs and economic effects.

Primary forms of agriculture subsidy include: 

•  
  • Direct payments to farmers and landlords
  • Price supports implemented with government purchases and storage
  • Regulations that set minimum prices by location, end use, or some other characteristic
  • Subsidies for such items as crop insurance, disaster response, credit, marketing, and irrigation water
  • Export subsidies
  • Import barriers in the form of quotas, tariffs, or regulations

In total, the average rate of “producer support estimate” for the heavily supported commodities in the United States ranges from about 55 percent of the value of production for sugar to about 22 percent for oilseeds. For the less-supported commodities the rate is usually below 5 percent.

Direct subsidy programs typically transfer income from consumers and taxpayers to farm operators, especially to owners of farmland and other resources used in farm production. Farm subsidies stimulate additional production of government-favored commodities by raising incentives to use land and farmer resources on some crops rather than on others.

Farm subsidy programs distort markets by creating false pricing levels for products, creating surpluses of subsidized crops and creating false demand, thus driving overproduction of targeted crops and underproduction of others. These effects are not limited to the domestic market alone.

Perhaps the most unfortunate and illogical manifestation of agriculture subsidies is their harmful effects on developing economies. Developing nations cannot move their economies and their people directly from subsistence farming to designing and manufacturing televisions and airplanes. The first step up the ladder for an economy is from subsistence farming, where the farmer produces only enough to feed their family, to surplus farming, where the farmer produces more food than their family needs.

When a farmer achieves surplus, the farmer can sell the surplus crops to market, thus generating cash. It is the first step in a market based, cash economy. That cash economy creates and sustains a merchant class, which supports a tax base, which can pay for building a country.

Domestic U.S. crop subsidies create false low prices for American crops such as corn and cotton. Coupled with the efficiencies of modern agriculture production, the direct and other forms of crop subsidies put American crops onto the world market at artificially low prices, lower than they actually cost to produce. In the case of cotton, world prices are as much as 20 percent lower than it costs to grow and market the crop due to U.S. cotton subsidies. Even a cotton farmer in West Africa who lives in a hut cannot compete with those prices.

Since that West African farmer is competing head to head with American cotton selling for a lower price than he can produce cotton, even with his extremely low costs, he cannot compete in the cotton market. Since he cannot sell any cotton, he cannot generate any cash from the market. Since he has no cotton sales, he cannot use his cotton sales cash to buy any other goods from the market. Since the farmers have no cash for the market, the merchant class remains constrained. Since the merchant class has very little money, there is very little tax base to grow and develop the country. Consequently, that farmer and his nation stay stuck in a cycle of endless poverty, generation after generation.

American foreign policy views that continuous cycle of poverty as a negative condition that can foster a sense of hopelessness that often leads directly to political instability, revolution and terrorism. As a result, the U.S. pours billions of dollars of cash and food aid into the farmer’s country. When the U.S. aid cash pours out of the sky, it is often pocketed by strong-man leaders, creating a permanent cycle of corrupt regimes. Normally, very, very little direct cash foreign aid ever reaches the people on the ground, people like the cotton farmer.

To make matters worse, the food aid the U.S. provides by the boat load is, of course, free, so it destroys whatever local market price there was for locally grown food crops. Now the cotton farmer, who could not compete with artificially low-priced American cotton, can not even use his land to grow food crops that he could sell at market. Those food prices have also been undermined by all the free American food being distributed.

Usually, the cotton farmer gives up and joins the long stream of migrants heading for the steaming, swarming slums of the cities to seek a better life, leaving his productive land, land capable of producing good crops of market-grade cotton, to bake in the sun.

In our current system, the United States taxpayers pay for direct cash payments to American farmers, the taxpayers pay higher prices for food and other products protected by U.S. trade barriers and the taxpayers pay industry subsidies to distort agricultural markets. As a result of these same policies, farmers, merchants and markets in developing nations are bankrupted, crippled and/or destroyed, leading to U.S. cash and food aid, which engenders permanent corruption, ensconces despots and cultivates terrorism.

Americans pay taxes that fund cash payments to large agriculture corporations to distort markets, Americans pay higher consumer prices for tariff affected goods, Americans pay taxes to support foreign aid to save the rural farmers destroyed by the artificially low prices our domestic subsidies create, Americans pay taxes to purchase food to ship to suffering countries destroyed by our domestic agricultural policies, Americans pay taxes to fund foreign financial aid diverted to the corrupt dictators we create by showering them with money, and, often, Americans pay taxes for the military and covert operations needed to suppress the terrorists that arise out of the same, now crippled, developing economies. Those terrorists are often created from the very farmers destroyed by the agricultural subsidies in the first place.

This logic only makes sense to agriculture lobbyists, short-sighted agricultural interests and American presidents, senators and representatives who sell their influence to the agricultural lobbyists and the interests they represent.

We cannot afford the direct costs of agricultural subsidies, or the short-, medium- and long-term effects those subsidies have on our world. Agriculture subsidies must end.

• Drug War

“You can never reveal my name, but I can tell you that what we’re doing doesn’t work and never will work.” I was speaking with a retired FBI field agent and former FBI / DEA liaison who spent most of his FBI career working with the DEA in South American drug producing countries. He grew up in a U.S. / Mexico border city and started his law enforcement career as a policeman there. “It was open warfare when I was a cop,” he continued. “It was us against the bike gangs, who were making millions moving speed.”

The retired FBI agent’s drug wars with the motorcycle gangs took place decades ago, not all that long after President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1969. That war has raged non-stop ever since. It is estimated the United States federal government currently spends over $15 billion dollars a year on the drug war and that does not include spending by state and local governments, which carry the primary burden.

Like any other market, the illegal drug market consists of two components: demand and supply. As proven throughout human history, as long as there is a demand, if there is enough profit to justify meeting that demand, there will be a supply.

When the FBI agent referred to “speed,” he was not referring to velocity, he was using the street term for amphetamines and methamphetamines. These illegal drugs have long been popular and widely available in the United States. They are difficult to eradicate, methamphetamine in particular, because it can be produced in an inexpensive portable kit that easily fits in a bathroom. The cost to produce a batch of methamphetamine is very low and its street price is very high, leading to profit margins of thousands of percent, and thus, high motivation to participate in production and distribution.

The 2007 wholesale price for a kilogram of heroin in Afghanistan ranged around $2,405; in Colombia, a kilogram of heroin no. 4 typically sold for $9,992 wholesale in 2006; in the United States in 2007, a kilogram of heroin no. 4 cost an average of $71,200 wholesale. That’s a gross margin per kilogram of between $61,208 and $68,795 depending on the source.

In 2004, a kilogram of cocaine in Colombia typically sold for $1,713; in Peru in 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for $1,000; in the United States in 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for $23,000. That’s a gross margin per kilogram of between $21,287 and $22,000 depending on the source.

The United States is the world’s largest market for cocaine and Colombian and Mexican heroin. Obviously, there is enough potential profit to justify the risks inherent in supplying the demand.

And, like any other market, if demand remains constant and you reduce supply, then the price increases.

The U.S. spends most of its money attempting to diminish supply. In fact, since 2002, the portion spent on reducing demand has fallen from nearly half (45.6 percent) of all money spent to about one third (34.3 percent). The current administration continued that trend, lowering the amount spent on demand reduction from 35.1 percent in 2009 to 34.3 percent in the 2010 proposed budget.

In 2010, the U.S. will spend $10 billion dollars at the federal level to reduce the supply of illegal drugs. In the last nine years the U.S. spent $71.6 billion dollars to reduce the supply of illegal drugs. Again, that does not include the money spent at the state and local level.

If the U.S. was successful in reducing the supply of illegal drugs, just as in any other market, prices would steadily increase. However, despite more than $71.6 billion dollars spent to reduce supply, prices for illegal drugs have not increased. For instance, between 1990 and 2003, wholesale prices for cocaine sold in the U.S. fell by two thirds in constant dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), a broad trend that continues today.

In addition, if the money the U.S. spends on the drug war, domestically and internationally, was effective, then the size of the world’s overall market for illegal drugs would shrink, both due to shrinking demand and diminishing supply. The opposite is true. The number of people using and producing illegal drugs has not diminished in absolute or relative terms over the last few decades.

If it has had no material effect on the demand for or the supply of illegal drugs, what has the War on Drugs yielded the United States?

•  
  • Up to half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption cases are convicted for drug-related offenses.
  • In 2007 the individual states spent a total of $6.2 billion dollars a year to incarcerate drug offenders.
  • In 1982 the justice system employed approximately 1.27 million persons; in 2003 it reached over 2.3 million, nearly doubling in size.
  • In the 16-year period 1987-2003, the total of judicial and legal employees grew about 101% to over 494,000 persons.
  • The total number of state and federal inmates grew from 403,000 in 1982 to over 1.4 million in 2003. The number of local jail inmates more than tripled from approximately 207,000 in 1982 to over 691,000 in 2003. Adults on probation increased from over 1.4 million to about 4.1 million persons. Overall, corrections employment more than doubled from nearly 300,000 to over 748,000 during this same period.
  • The number of people in state prisons for drug offenses has increased 550 percent over the last 20 years, from 1989 to 2009.
  • The percentage of offenders incarcerated for drug offenses accounted for the largest percentage of total growth in prison population, 49 percent, between 1995 and 2003.
  • At the retail level, in 2005 the global illegal drug industry was larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of 88 percent of the world’s nations. At the wholesale level, illegal drugs were a larger market than global exports of ores and other minerals.
  • In 2009, over 15 million people used illicit opiates (opium, heroin and morphine) annually. The value of the global opiate market is estimated at US$ 65 billion.
  • In 2008, an estimated 994 metric tons (2,191,372 pounds) of cocaine was produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, most of it bound for the United States. At typical wholesale prices, that represents about $22 billion dollars in gross margin for the drug cartels for cocaine sales alone.
  • In 2008, an estimated 5,249 metric tons (11,571,945 pounds) of marijuana was grown in the United States out of the estimated 98,681 metric tons (217,552,133 pounds) grown worldwide. At typical wholesale prices, that represents about $23 billion dollars in U.S. sales to the drug cartels, not including what is smuggled in across the borders. 
  • And, despite the efforts of the retired FBI agent fighting the motorcycle gangs along the border early in his career, in 2007 global production of amphetamines and methamphetamines was estimated at 435 metric tons (959,001 pounds), with an estimated 3.8 million regular users in North America alone.

What has the drug war yielded?

•  
  • It has yielded the United States having more people in prison than any other nation; on any given day more than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States, almost one in every hundred Americans. Over the course of a year, 13.5 million people spend time in prison or jail in the U.S., over four percent of the population. Most of them are there for drug related offenses, including the property crimes committed to purchase drugs.
  • It has yielded a prison recidivism rate of 67 percent of former prisoners rearrested within three years of their release and 52 percent re-incarcerated. After attending “criminal college” in prison, about a fourth of those initially imprisoned for nonviolent crimes are sentenced for a second time for committing a violent offense.
  • It has yielded a global market that pumps more than $8 trillion dollars a year into drug cartels and organized crime. Those same drug cartels have used that $8 trillion dollars a year to destabilize governments in every major drug producing and transshipment country in the world, institutionalizing corruption and undermining human rights and democracy.
  • It has yielded insidious corruption among U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement departments, agencies and personnel.
  • It has yielded U.S. federal, state and local bureaucracies, case loads and expenditures that dwarf those for any other aspect of crime or criminal behavior.
  • It has yielded no material effect on either the demand for illegal drugs or the supply of illegal drugs.

We can no longer afford to enrich the drug cartels and organized crime, as well as undermine governments and human rights in drug producing and transshipment countries.

We can no longer afford to spend more than five times as much on failed drug enforcement as we do on drug treatment, the only thing that can reduce drug abuse, drug crime, arrest and incarceration. We must aggressively intervene with drug treatment to reduce demand in the only sustainably possible way.

We can no longer afford to incarcerate, and then quickly re-incarcerate, almost one percent of our population in an endless cycle of creating, indoctrinating and producing an ever more violent class of criminal.

We can no longer afford to have illegal drugs, something we can never stop, pass unregulated and untaxed through our economy. We must tax illegal drugs, we must regulate illegal drugs and we must create a taxed and regulated international market that directs the money in this market to foreign governments, not foreign drug cartels and organized crime.

We can no longer afford the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs must end.

• Exceptionalism

 “I do not think so much of America. You make movies and music. And you have the big military. After that, what?” This quote is from a German traveler I interviewed in South America. The comment reflects a common attitude amongst many of the Europeans I have known and interviewed.

This comment and outlook is diametrically opposed to the principal of American exceptionalism that has defined U.S. foreign policy and domestic culture since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. During America’s brief reign at the top of the world’s pecking order after WWII, American exceptionalism has been used as a sword, a shield, a fig leaf and, most recently, been redefined in ways to nearly make irrelevant its orthodox historical meaning.

Historically, American exceptionalism was the principal that the United States was uniquely different from other nations and cultures due to its principles and beliefs, historic origin, natural resources and multi-racial, multi-cultural makeup. Due to the country’s founding by religious puritans, there were often divine attributes and mandates that were intertwined with the concept of American exceptionalism.

In recent history, a neo-exceptionalism has arisen that supplanted the traditional definition of American exceptionalism with a strident, often outright jingoistic version used as a generic rationalization for international unilateralism and cultural arrogance.

American exceptionalism, in both its traditional and neo- variation form the boundaries and foundation for many popular media touchstones in American culture. In music, in folklore, in movies and in television, the principals of America’s superior virtues are introduced at an early age and continuously reinforced throughout childhood and adulthood. Thus, the concept of inherent American superiority is deeply ingrained within its citizens.

There is little to no perceived need to question what is part and parcel of the American experience, and attempts to do so can be branded as both heresy and treason by those who lean toward neo-exceptionalism.

In addition, Americans have very little external perspective on their country or their culture. Only 27 percent of Americans have valid passports. Of those Americans who do travel outside their own country, the majority take short vacation trips to Canada, Mexican and Caribbean vacation resorts and, at a much lower rate, the United Kingdom (U.K.) and France.

Again by large margins, Americans prefer international destinations that require as little cultural adjustment as possible, such as Australia, the U.K., Ireland, Scotland and Canada. Because American vacations are typically limited to two weeks, there is often an attempt to cram as many tourist destinations into as little time as possible. Tourist destinations very rarely offer the opportunity to truly learn about foreign cultures or interact in a meaningful way with the people of other nations. As such, of the Americans who do travel internationally, extremely few have the opportunity to gain a representative outside perspective of their own nation and culture.

Given the deeply rooted and repeatedly reinforced theme of American exceptionalism and the widespread lack of external perspective, it can be no surprise that policies and actions taken under the mantle of exceptionalism are viewed by most Americans as not only justifiable, but just.

However, if you step outside the fishbowl that is the United States and view the concept of American exceptionalism from an external perspective, it is possible to arrive at a different conclusion.

America is indeed unique in many ways. It is alone among nations in being a nation of immigrants. That attribute, in fact, is one of the nation’s primary differentiators and sustainable global competitive advantages. The United States, historically, has been an unsurpassed engine of innovation. That innovation is due, in no small measure, to the mix of cultures and ideas that springs from the “nation of immigrants” characteristic, as well as the free enterprise economic system and the concept, if not reality, of a national meritocracy. The U.S. is also viewed by the people of the world as the fountainhead of opportunity, the single best place where anyone can, with hard work and commitment, achieve success. To a greater or lesser extent, historically, America has also been viewed as the nation that best reflected its bill of rights and freedoms enshrined in its Constitution.

The challenge America faces is that these unique attributes, these characteristics that can form the basis of a moderate, positive form of American exceptionalism, are not those that dominate the popular and current conception of exceptionalism. Instead, in recent form, American exceptionalism has been debased into a variation of jingoistic hyper-nationalism and hyper-patriotism, often rooted in divine rights and mandates.

In the 1950s, things were different for the U.S. than they are now. U.S. Representative Charles Wilson (Democrat, Texas), of Charlie Wilson’s War fame, said of 1950s America, “We were undisputedly the kings of the world, and everybody knew it. We were arrogant sons of bitches.” The world has changed since the 1950s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off in a geopolitical battle of good versus evil, black versus white, capitalism versus communism. In today’s world, the U.S. is not the rock-solid superpower, the towering, dominating geopolitical, economic and cultural force, or the stable and reliable touchstone that it was then. In the 1950s, it was easy for most Americans to form and sustain a view of the U.S. that was indisputably exceptional in nearly every way.

But this is not the 1950s. The world is very different now, as is the United States. In many ways, the rest of the world has caught up or is gaining rapidly. In many ways, the U.S. is not as inherently exceptional using the same metrics as those which formed the basis of Americans’ exceptional view of their country in the 1950s.

America remains exceptional in that it is the world’s only immigrant nation. America remains exceptional in that it is the world’s hotbed of innovation. America remains exceptional in that it is the best place to achieve prosperity, to reach goals, to achieve a dream. America remains exceptional in that it is still an ongoing experiment in representative democracy of the people, by the people, for the people.

People in totalitarian countries, those recently freed from the yoke of oppression and those fearing the same tend to continue to view America as exceptional for the principles, rights and freedoms embedded in the Constitution of the United States. People in other countries, especially those who have no cultural memory of living under the bootheel of oppression or who have geopolitical reasons to oppose the U.S., often insightfully observe that American exceptionalism is limited to America’s popular media and its military power, viewing the remainder as a hollow shell of boastfulness and hype.

America’s challenges are that its internal cultural view of what forms American exceptionalism, typically the 1950s version, is often at odds with those national characteristics that remain exceptional, and that much, if not most, of the rest of the world holds a very different view of contemporary America’s unique characteristics than the typical American.

Blanket American exceptionalism, especially neo-exceptionalism, leads to an ever more isolated and insular America. An insular U.S. is increasingly prone to both economic and cultural isolationism and over-reaction to perceived international lack of cooperation and hostility. A neo-exceptionalism America is, by definition, predestined to disastrous foreign policies and unilateral actions. 

In an ever more integrated, increasingly level-playing-field world, we cannot afford to be insular, isolated, or over-reactive.

We cannot afford 1950s American exceptionalism, especially neo-exceptionalism. Neo-exceptionalism and 1950s American exceptionalism must end.

 ***

 As citizens, as an electorate, there is a long list of things we can no longer afford, including, but not limited to: 

• Quick-fix solutions
• Short term thinking
• Blind materialism
• Business as usual
• Simple solutions to complex problems promoted by those with vested interests

 While each of these, in and of themselves, could spell our doom as a society, none threaten us as much as abdication.

• Abdication

As a people, we have abdicated governance to a permanent, corrupt ruling class. We have abdicated thought to a craven, hyper-partisan media. And, most damaging of all, we have abdicated personal responsibility in its entirety.

During the long era of prosperity between the end of WWII and the recent great recession Americans couldn’t be bothered with worrying about government and public policy, there was too much fun to be had, leisure time to be enjoyed and money to spend to waste time on how the society was formed and governed. We just didn’t have the time, energy or interest to spare on what was really going on with government and what was really happening with all the billions of dollars that flowed into our state capitals and Washington, D.C. to buy influence. With gadgets, endless forms of entertainment and ever busier lives, who had time to care about such things as who owned our elected representatives and what they did with all that power and influence.

That time is now over. It is no longer a time when things are so good we don’t need to pay attention. The world we face today requires our full and undivided attention, and that includes our government.

We can no longer afford to abdicate governance to a permanent, corrupt ruling class. As citizens, we must reclaim governance.

America has long depended on authority figures to explain how the world works and how it affects them. Whether it was the pastor in the pulpit, the local newspaper editor or the nightly newscaster, Americans trusted their authority figures, especially those in the media, to boil down the issues and challenges of the day into understandable, bite size chunks that were both palatable and easily digested. Unfortunately, that journey has digressed to the point that the only palatable and digestible chunks of information America can handle consist of “It’s not your fault,” and “The other side are idiots.”

As a consequence, America is now left rudderless in the sea of information, with no one at the tiller of the ship and no way to steer it if there was. Americans still turn to the media for guidance, but now find the cupboard stocked only with ultra-partisan fare, tasty only to those who seek one flavor of information: that which tells them they are super-smart for thinking the way they do and that anybody who thinks differently is today an idiot and tomorrow is likely not to be worthy of living.

The media is no longer equipped to interpret and communicate the events of our time. The media is no longer capable of providing unbiased content valid for forming even-handed opinions and policies.

We can no longer afford to abdicate thought to the media. As individuals, we must seek out facts and form our own opinions, make our own decisions and determine our own fates.

There was a time in the United States when personal responsibility was not the exception; it was the social norm in American society. In that era, people were expected to stand up and take responsibility for their actions. In our current times, Americans are most noted for dodging personal responsibility. America is no longer known as a place where people stand up and take responsibility for their actions, now it is known as a place where we sue the people who sell us hot coffee when we spill it on ourselves. America is known as a place where we expect the schools to teach our children values and morals. America is known as a place that no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances, it is always somebody else’s fault—somebody else’s responsibility. America is known as a place where it is a newsworthy event, the rare exception, when a person takes responsibility rather than eludes it.

This long, slow slide from responsibility has delivered us to a place where every single American has an adamant and fiery sense of entitlement to what they believe they are guaranteed regardless of if they have done nothing personally to earn it. Every single American believes they are entitled to everything from free speech to clean water to a chicken in every pot, but very few Americans actually put themselves on the line to produce or ensure those things. What Americans do instead is sidestep that line, hedge that line, dance around that line, do anything but step up to that line of personal responsibility for their choices and their actions.

 We can no longer afford to abdicate responsibility. As individuals and as a country, we can no longer evade responsibility for our choices and our actions. We must step up, stand up and take responsibility.

 *****

As a nation and as individuals we need to face reality as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be.

The coming challenges in this decade require us to make hard choices. The first of those choices must be to keep what we can afford and eliminate that which we can no longer afford.

Choose what we can afford.

*******

Notes:

• Cost of foreign oil is based on average cost of imported oil per barrel at the refinery.
• Full disclosure: I grew up in Iowa, an agricultural state in the United States. Many of my family were farmers or directly or primarily dependent on the agricultural sector of the economy. I currently own farmland in Iowa that is used to produce grain. Members of my family are directly affected by agriculture subsidy programs.

Sources:

• United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• United States Department of Commerce
• United States Department of Energy
• United States National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• United States Department of Justice (DOJ)
• United States Department of State
• United States Government Accountability Office (GAO)
• United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Executive Office of the President of the United States
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
• National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University
• Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons
• OXFAM
• Library of Economics and Liberty
• Center for Responsive Politics www.opensecrets.org
• American Bar Association
• RAND
• New England Journal of Medicine
• American Psychologist
• New York Times

The challenge is to be aware of the upsides of the United States without becoming defiantly hostile to any discussion of specific shortcomings or ways the U.S. could improve, or, conversely, becoming so immersed and versed in America’s downsides as to become blind to the unique positive capabilities, characteristics and opportunities the U.S. offers.

When you live in the United States, it often seems as if the U.S. is either all bad or all good depending on which political party is in power and which talk radio station, screaming cable channel or hyper-partisan web site or publication you are feeding into your head at the moment.

In addition, the United States has a long cultural history of and peculiar cultural affection for jeremiads, mournful and often bitter lamentations about the state of society and government. If you spend any time exposing yourself to discussion or media concerning public or foreign policy, it won’t be long before you come across one form of jeremiad or another predicting the imminent doom of the country, accompanied by a long list of complaints and depressing statistics. However, as they say about paranoia, just because a jeremiad shouts that the sky is falling doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The challenge is to sort out the real threats from the partisan fueled hyperbole and opponent bashing.

Faced with so much hyper-partisan ideology and agenda-advancing content, it can be difficult to establish and maintain an assessment of where the country actually is relative to the rest of the world, much less where it needs to go.

Here are some objective facts to help achieve that goal.

Upsides:

• The U.S. leads the world in innovation, which provides incalculable benefits for everyone else on the planet. The modern world is filled with technology that was invented in the United States, from the personal computer to the laser. In addition to general technology, it is estimated that 8 out of 10 inventions and advancements in medicine and health care in the last 50 years originated in the United States. Just as American general technology innovations are used to drive productivity growth worldwide, American health care inventions and advancements are used by every country on earth to improve the health care of their citizens.

At the same time they are reaping the benefits of increased productivity and reduced costs, those countries have not needed to invest in the education, science, facilities, supporting infrastructure, tax credits and research and development that brought about those advances. In effect, the United States subsidizes the entire world by funding the invention and development of new technologies that are used worldwide to advance societies and increase productivity.

In addition to technologies, life saving drugs developed in the United States are often sold here for many times higher prices than elsewhere. We pay higher prices for those drugs to pay the pharmaceutical companies for the $500 million to more than $1 billion dollars required to discover, develop and bring a new drug to market. Other countries get those drugs for low prices, essentially getting all the research and development required to develop new drugs for free. The same is true for medical devices, such as diagnostic imaging, and medical procedures. In these ways, the U.S. effectively subsidizes health care for the entire globe. Consequently, other countries, especially the European Union, have enjoyed relatively low societal costs of health care relative to the United States.

• The U.S. leads the world in military spending, by a huge margin, spending nearly eight times as much as the next closest country, China. The U.S. spends nearly half of the world’s total military spending at 45 percent. The upside of all of this spending is that it has guaranteed peace and security for countries from Europe to the oil producing Gulf states in the Middle East. The latter, maintaining stability in the Middle East, is often used as a negative example of American intervention, but the fact remains that nearly every oil importing nation in the world relies on Middle Eastern oil, and those oil dependant nations include most of America’s harshest critics on this score.

The inherent threat of America’s military muscle has enabled it to settle disputes between upstart nations, rogue regimes, regional enemies and global powers. Perhaps most significantly, it provided a shield that allowed multiple generations of Canadians and Europeans to grow and prosper within an artificial bubble that has never known conflict or war.  This enabled Canada and Western Europe to build their nations while spending a tiny portion of their budgets on their military forces.

In the case of Europe, the money they would have otherwise spent keeping the Russians at bay went instead to building very generous welfare states, including cradle to grave benefits. As such, it is impossible to compare those societies, which have rebuilt or grown within the bubble of America’s security shield, to the United States, especially in terms of social benefits and economic structure. Those European economies that have profited from the protection of the United States have never been required to have an economy that could fully support themselves, they have all been subsidized by American military spending. That American military spending not only negated the need for those nations to buy a viable and effective domestic military, but also subsidized the local economies through direct injection of billions of dollars via American bases, contracts and procurement. The colloquial version of this reality is the paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher’s comment on socialism, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” In this case, the other people’s money has been and continues to be provided by America’s free market capitalist economy, a system often roundly derided by the very Europeans who have been profiting from its subsidies for generations.

The United States also is a leading nation in the world on multiple additional objective measures:

• Universities, 1^st in the world with 18 of the top 25 and 31 of the top 100 ranked institutions. In the top 100, the U.S. ranks ahead of (2) United Kingdom (UK) with 18 in the top 100, (3) Australia with 8, (4) Canada with 4 and (5) China with 3.
• Top 500 businesses, 1^st in the world with 140 of the world’s top 500 companies, leading (2) Japan with 68, (3) France with 40, (4) Germany with 39, (5) China with 37, (6) United Kingdom (UK) with 26, (7) Switzerland with 15, (8) Canada with 14, (9) South Korea with 14 and (10) Netherlands with 12, including the world’s largest company, Royal Dutch Shell.
• Top 100 software companies, 1^st in the world, with 74 of the top 100 companies, leading (2) Japan with 8, (3) France with 4, (4) United Kingdom (UK) with 4, and (5) Germany with 3.
• Internet hosts (a computer connected directly to the internet), 1^st in the world with 338 million, leading (2) Japan with 47 million, (3) Germany with 24 million, (4) Italy with 22 million and (5) Brazil with 16 million.
• Aid to developing countries (official direct aid (ODA)(2008)), 1^st in the world at $25.4 billion, leading (2) Germany at $13 billion, (3) United Kingdom (UK) at $12 billion, (4) France at $10 billion and (5) Japan at $8.3 billion. Note that these numbers do not reflect direct private giving to charity, a category in which the United States leads the world, by far. 
• Kilometers of railroad track, 1^st with 226,427 kilometers ahead of (2) Russia with 87,157, (3) China with 77,834, (4) India with 63,327, (5) Canada with 46,688, (6) Germany with 41,896, (7) Australia with 37,855, (8) Argentina with 31,409, (9) France with 29,213 and (10) Brazil with 28,857. Note that the railway systems of India, Argentina and Brazil were largely built during their colonial period with widely varying levels, often very low, of investment in maintenance since.
• Airports (airports or airfields recognizable from the air, may be paved or unpaved), 1^st with 15,095, leading (2) Brazil with 4,000, (3) Mexico with 1,744, (4) Canada with 1,388, (5) Russia with 1,216, (6) Argentina with 1,130, (7) Colombia with 992 and (8) Bolivia with 952. Note that Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia are heavily involved with the production and shipment of illegal drugs, thus leading to a very high density of airfields relative to their population and geographic size.
• Roadways (kilometers of paved and unpaved roads), 1^st with 6,465,799 kilometers, leading (2) China with 3,583,715, (3) India with 3,316,452, (4) Brazil with 1,751,868, (5) Japan with 1,203,777 and (6) Canada with 1,042,300. Note that many roads in the developing world, such as India and Brazil, are not what most Americans would term a road. Also note that Japan’s roadways represent an extraordinary amount for such a limited geographic area, highlighting the hyper-developed nature of that country.
• Market value of publicly traded shares (price per share multiplied by the total number of outstanding shares, cumulated over all companies listed on the particular exchange on December 31 of the noted year), 1^st at $19.95 trillion dollars (2007), leading (2) European Union at $15.57 (2008), (3) China at $6.23 (2007), (4) Japan at $4.45 (2007), (5) United Kingdom (UK) at $3.86 (2007), (6) France at $2.77 (2007), (7) Canada at $2.19 (2007), (8) Germany at $2.11 (2007), (9) India at $1.82 (2007) and (10) Spain at $1.80 (2007).
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP), purchasing power parity basis(PPP), 2^nd  with $14.26 trillion dollars, trailing (1) European Union at $14.52 and leading (3) China at $8.77, (4) Japan at $4.14, (5) India at $ 3.55, (6) Germany at $ 2.81, (7) United Kingdom (UK) at $2.17, (8) France at $2.11, (9) Russia at $2.10 and (10) Brazil at $2.02.
• Fixed telephone lines, 2^nd with 150,000,000, trailing (1) China with 365,600,000 and leading (3) Germany with 51,500,000.
• Imports (exchange rate basis), 2^nd with $1,445 billion dollars, trailing (1) European Union with $1,690 and leading (3) Germany with $1,022, (4) China with $ 922, (5) France with $ 532 and (6) Japan with $490.
• Movies produced annually, 2^nd with 611, trailing (1) India with 946 and leading (3) Japan with 310, (4) China with 212 and (5) France with 203.
• Annual household Income (purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted), 2^nd at $50,233, trailing (1) Switzerland at $60,288 and leading (3) Canada at $44,000, (4) New Zealand at $41,000, (5) United Kingdom (UK) at $39,000 and (6) Australia at $38,000. Note that this metric can be difficult to compare as the value of various social programs may or may not be included in the source data for each country.
• Mobile (cell) phones, 3^rd with 270,000,000, trailing (1) China with 634,000,000, (2) India with 427,300,000 and leading (4) Russia with 187,500,000, (5) Brazil with 150,641,000, (6) Indonesia with 140,578,000 and (7) Japan with 110,395,000. 
• Oil production, 3^rd at 8,514,000 barrels per day (bbl/day) (an oil barrel is 42 U.S. gallons or 159 liters), trailing (2) Russia at 9,810,000 and (1) Saudi Arabia at 10,780,000. The U.S. leads (4) Iran at 4,174,000 and (5) China at 3,795,000, (6) Canada at 3,350,000 and (7) Mexico at 3,186,000. The total North American oil production of Canada, Mexico and the United States is 15,050,000 bbl/day, although due to very low re-investment in equipment and exploration by their state owned and operated oil monopoly, Mexico’s production has dropped dramatically in the last few years and will continue to dwindle until significant investments are made.
• Exports (exchange rate basis), 4^th with $995 billion dollars, trailing (1) European Union with $1,952, (2) China with $1,194, (3) Germany with $1,187 and leading (5) Japan with $516 and (6) France with $ 457.
• Steel production (2009), 4^th with 58.142 million metric tons, leading (5) India at 56.608 and trailing (3) Russia at 59.940, (2) Japan at 87.534 and (1) China at 567.842. In 2009, China produced 47 percent of the world’s steel.
• GDP per capita, (PPP basis), 10^th at $46,400. In this ranking the U.S. trails, (1) Liechtenstein $ 122,100, (2) Qatar $ 121,400, (3) Luxembourg $ 77,600, (4) Bermuda $ 69,900, (5) Norway $ 59,300, (6) Jersey $ 57,000, (7) Kuwait $ 55,800, (8) Singapore $ 50,300, and (9) Brunei $ 50,100. Note that aside from the U.S., all of these countries except the city-state of Singapore are either oil producers, tax havens or off-shore banking centers often used to launder money for criminal activities and tax evasion. In the sense of normal nation-state economies, the U.S. leads this ranking.

In addition to these objective measures, the United States leads the developed world in diversity, integration of immigrants, and opportunity for upward mobility. The U.S. is among the world leaders in creativity, discovery and innovation as measured by patents, Nobel Prizes and other recognitions of scientific and creative achievement. Perhaps the most telling measure of all is that the United States leads the world in aspiration. More people perceive the United States as the best place to live than anywhere else on the planet. More people want to come to the United States to realize their dreams of prosperity and advancement for themselves and their families than anywhere else in the world.

But as we know, all is not sweetness and light in America. The United States has shortcomings, downfalls and persistent unresolved issues. Among them are:

Downsides:

• Oil consumption, 1^st at 19,500,000 barrels per day (bbl/day) (an oil barrel is 42 U.S. gallons or 159 liters), leading (2) European Union at 14,440,000 bbl/day, (3) China at 7,999,000, (4) Japan at 4,785,000, (5) India at 2,940,000 and (6) Russia at 2,800,000. Of these nations, only Russia produces enough oil to meet its current domestic needs. Both China and India are experiencing high growth rates in net oil imports. China and India’s foreign oil dependency will be 61 percent and 85 percent respectively in 2010, meaning China will depend on foreign oil imports for 61 percent of their oil needs while India will depend on foreign imports for 85 percent of their needs. Due to limited domestic oil resources, both percentages are expected to rise as their respective economies continue to grow. By 2030 India will pass Japan to become the fourth largest consumer of oil.
• Science knowledge by 15 year olds (2006), 21^st at 489, trailing (20) Iceland at 491, (19) France at 495, (18) Denmark at 496, (17) Poland at 498 and leading (22) Slovakia at 488, (23) Spain at 488 and (24) Norway at 487. The top scoring country was (1) Finland at 563 trailed by (2) Canada at 534.
• In percentage of citizens living below the poverty line, the U.S. ranks 22^nd at 12 percent, trailing (21) Syria at 11.9 percent and leading (23) Slovenia at 12.9 percent. Among developed nations, the U.S. trails (20) Germany at 11 percent, (18) Canada at 10.8 percent, (17) Netherlands at 10.5 percent, (8) Ireland at 7 percent, (6) France at 6.2 percent and (5) Austria at 5.9 percent. Note that many countries use different methodologies to establish the poverty level, so these statistics are not viewed as necessarily reliable or “apples to apples” comparisons, especially by global organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. In addition, some countries statistics are viewed as unreliable and unrealistic, especially in the developing world.
• Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1,000 live births), 6.22, ranking 44^th, trailing (43) Northern Mariana Islands at 6.00 and (42) Cuba at 5.82 and leading (45) Faroe Islands at 6.32 and (46) Croatia at 6.37. The next highest ranking developed nation above the U.S. is Italy, at 5.51. Singapore holds the best ranking, 1^st, at 2.31 and Sweden is 3^rd with 2.75. Note that the infant mortality rate in some countries is skewed lower (better) due to forced abortions of suspected flawed fetuses, such as in Cuba.
• Life expectancy at birth, 78.11 years, ranking 49^th behind (48) Portugal at 78.21 among developed nations. The leader is (1) Macau at 84.36 years with (3) Japan holding the top developed nation spot at 82.12 years.
• Education expenditures as a percent of GDP, tied with Jamaica and Belize at 5.3 percent with a ranking 57^th, trailing (54) Ghana, (53) South Africa and (52) Austria at 5.4 percent. (16) Iceland leads the developed nations at 7.6 percent followed by (20) Norway at 7.4 percent.
• Public debt as a percentage of GDP (PPP basis), 64^th at 39.70 percent, leading (65) Dominican Republic at 41.50 percent and trailing (63) Yemen at 39.60 percent. The last spot is held by (129) Zimbabwe at 304.3 percent, with the worst developed nations trailing at (128) Japan at 192.10 percent, (123) Italy 115.20 percent, (122) Greece 108.10 percent, (120) Iceland 100.60 percent, (119) Belgium 99.00 percent, (114) France 79.70 percent and (113) Germany 77.20 percent. Note that the purpose of the purchasing power parity (PPP) adjustment is to create a common unit of comparison between economies of different value. The public debt as a portion of GDP represented here is valid for some comparisons between disparate economies, but it is not related to the direct, unadjusted ratio of U.S. public debt to GDP commonly used in U.S. government departments, congress or the media.

On a non-PPP basis, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that under the current proposed budget, debt held by the American public would grow from $7.5 trillion (53 percent of GDP) at the end of 2009 to $20.3 trillion (90 percent of GDP) at the end of 2020. As a result, net interest would more than quadruple between 2010 and 2020 in nominal dollars (without an adjustment for inflation). Net interest payments on the public debt would expand from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2010 to 4.1 percent in 2020.

• In income distribution, a measure of the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country (using the Gini Index, a United Nations (UN) metric, best = 0, worst = 100) the U.S. ranks 92^nd at 45.0, trailing (91) Cameroon at 44.6 and leading (93) Uruguay at 45.2. The U.S. trails, by relatively modest margins, communist or recently communist countries, countries that would, at least in theory, be closest to to the ideal score of zero by government and social structure design. Those current or recent communist countries include (81) Russia at 42.3, (79) China at 41.5 and (57) Vietnam at 37.0. Among non-communist developed economies, the U.S. trails (61) Japan at 38.1, (43) United Kingdom (UK) at 34.0, (37) France at 32.7, (35) Canada at 32.1 and (12) Germany at 27.0. Sweden leads the world at 23.0. Note that these results show that the goal of universal social equality that is the basis of communism has not been achieved by any country that uses or has used that political system. The closest to that ideal has been achieved by the democratic socialist countries of Western Europe, all of which have enjoyed subsidies from the U.S. in the form of technological innovation, health care innovation (drugs, products and procedures) and military protection.
• In gross fixed investment as a percentage of GDP, the measure of total business spending on fixed assets, such as factories, machinery, equipment, dwellings, and inventories of raw materials, which provide the basis for future production, the U.S. ranks 144^th at 12.50 percent. Rapidly growing economies rank highly, such as (3) China at 42.60 percent. More mature economies come in lower, such as the (98) European Union at 19.70 percent.
• Aid to developing countries as a percentage of GDP (PPP) (Official Development Assistance (ODA)), dead last, 22^nd at 0.18 percent. The U.S. trails (21) Greece at 0.19 percent, (20) Japan at 0.20 percent and (19) Italy at 0.23 percent. (1) Sweden leads at 1.35 percent, trailed by (2) Norway at 1.32 percent and (3) Denmark at 1.29 percent. Note that these figures are official government ODA aid only and do not include direct private contributions to charity, of which the U.S. leads the world at $307.6 billion in 2008. Adding allocations of private charity donations targeted to international aid to U.S. government ODA yields a ranking for the U.S. of 17^th at 0.33 percent, leading (18) New Zealand at 0.30 percent and trailing (16) Canada at 0.36 percent.
• For weights and measures, the United States ranks dead last. The U.S. is the last meaningful economy to integrate with the way the world weighs and measures things using the easy to teach, easy to lean and easy to use metric system. The United States is one of three countries that have not officially adopted and implemented the metric system, the other two being Burma (Myanmar) and Liberia, two countries whose combined GDP is less than Delaware’s. More than six billion people use the metric system for weights and measures. The citizens and companies of the United States operate at an ongoing disadvantage of familiarity and extra costs required to comply with the global standard.

The loss of a $125 million dollar NASA mission to Mars because U.S. measurements were incorrectly mixed with global metric measurements is the best  known cost for clinging to the arcane inch / pound system. However, that $125 million dollars is merely the tip of the iceberg. Based on other developed countries’ experiences converting to metric, the U.S. spends an additional $1.28 trillion annually in excess costs to maintain dual measurements in the production of private sector goods and services. That’s $1.28 trillion a year that could otherwise be invested in science, research and development, new life saving drugs, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, education, etc. That $1.28 trillion in annual costs does not include additional expenses related to public sector goods and services, such as the duplicative costs to public education in teaching every single pupil in the country two measurement systems.

In addition to these objective comparisons, the United States has its fair share of subjective and relative failings and shortcomings, including, but by no means limited to, cultural insularity, lingering racism, declining academic performance, deteriorating infrastructure, relentless federal deficits, skyrocketing public debt, inadequate financial regulation, massive illegal drug demand, dependence on foreign oil, declining public health, hyper-partisan political polarization and a paralyzed, ineffective government incapable of addressing, much less overcoming, the range of major challenges the country faces.

***

In summary, the United States is just like any other human or group of humans. The U.S. has its strengths and weaknesses, just like every other nation. The U.S. is neither as ideal and blameless as its most ardent supporters claim, or as degenerate and malevolent as its most shrill detractors assert.

One of its undeniable strengths is that the nation as a whole has proven again and again to have incredible powers to adapt to changing circumstances and rise to meet common challenges.

The question now is whether the nation, or more specifically, the people of the United States, can recognize the speed and scope of the changes and, even more of a challenge, reach common consensus on how to overcome those challenges.

*******

 Sources:

• United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
• National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
• Gallup
• Xinhua News Agency
• International Energy Agency
• World Steel Association
• U.S. Metric Association
• USA Giving
• Metrication Matters
• US News and World Report
• Fortune
• CNN
• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
• Wikipedia

“…our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are … testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

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The United States of America faces an unprecedented combination of challenges in the coming decade. Bankrupt finances, political extremist and ideologues, government gridlock, a decaying infrastructure, dependence on foreign oil, declining education standards and results, loss of credible information sources, public health and geopolitical decline relative to rising powers all promise to change the very nature of life as we know it. 

Consider the following list of facts, and also consider the implications of these facts, which will all combine in the next ten years.

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This year, in 2010, the United States government will borrow $40 of every $100 it spends. The majority of that debt will be due for payment within five years.

If things continue as they are, in 2020 the United States will have a public debt of $21.5 trillion dollars, up from $12.5 trillion dollars today.

By 2020 the annual federal deficit is projected at $1.3 trillion dollars.

Annual interest payments on the public debt in 2020 are expected to reach $723 billion.

If things continue as they are, the public debt will continue to rise, since the United States cannot afford to pay for the programs it is committed to. Those promises that can’t be paid for, unfunded liabilities primarily in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, add up to a minimum of $75 trillion dollars.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculates that entitlement spending (primarily Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) will grow from 9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) today to 20 percent in 2025.

In America, more than 10,000 baby-boomers will become eligible for Social Security and Medicare every day for the next two decades.

If health care costs continue to grow at their historical rates, Medicare and Medicaid will double as a share of spending on Federal programs within the next 30 years.

Unless major policy changes are implemented, in just 10 years the United States will spend almost its entire income, every penny taken in via taxes, fees, duties, etc., just paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the interest on the public debt. There will be no money left to pay for the rest of government as we know it—everything from the military to milk standards.

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In February 2010, nationally, 4.58 percent of mortgages, 13.6 percent of high yield bonds and 11.2 percent of credit cards were in default.

In September 2009, United States consumers held $917 billion dollars in credit card debt and $69 billion of it was past due.

One of every three American consumers carry credit card balances up to $10,000.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank, 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn.

Between 2007 and 2009 7.2 millions jobs were lost in the U.S., with 1.6 million lost in construction.

Between 1997 and 2009 six million American jobs were lost in manufacturing.

In February 2010 the U.S. lost 36,000 jobs and the national total unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and people forced to hold part-time jobs, hit 16.8 percent.

Even as the unemployment rate climbed toward 10 percent, three million U.S. jobs went unfulfilled in 2008 because the U.S. workforce lacked necessary skills.

Nearly one in three American workers will be over 50 by 2012.

More than 26 percent, or one in four, of the nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

Worn-out water systems leak away 20 gallons of fresh water per day for every American, more than 6 billion gallons of water per day is wasted.

The average dam in the United States is 50 years old.

The cost of bringing the nation’s infrastructure up to adequacy is estimated at $2.2 trillion over the next five years, or twice as much as is now budgeted by all levels of government.

Sixty-eight percent of members of the National Academy of Public Administration surveyed said that the U.S. government was “less likely to successfully execute projects than at any time in the past.”

The United States ranks last of 40 nations in the rate of change in innovation capacity over the last decade.

Rate of Change of Innovation Capacity Prior Decade

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It can cost $1 billion more to build, equip, and operate a factory in the United States than it does outside the U.S., with 70 percent of the cost difference accounted for by lower taxes, and 90 percent of the cost difference explained by government policies (including grants and tax credits), not wages.

Out of 104 nations, in 2009 the U.S. ranked 27th in health, 19th in safety and security, 16th in governance and 7th in education.

In 2008 68 percent of men and 72 percent of women were overweight or obese in America. 

Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity has tripled among school-age children and adolescents.

More than three in ten American children are overweight or obese.

Health effects of obesity include high blood pressure; diabetes; heart disease; joint problems, including osteoarthritis; sleep apnea and respiratory problems; cancer; metabolic syndrome; and psychosocial effects. Most of these conditions are chronic and can more than double the lifetime cost of health care compared to a non-obese citizen.

Most, if not all, of the mid- and long-term cost projections for U.S. health care do not accurately reflect the increased chronic condition costs of America’s overweight and obese population.

Life expectancy in America is below the average for 30 advanced countries measured by the OECD, and the obesity rate in America is the worst among those 30 countries, by far.

If left unchanged, by 2017 U.S. health care spending is projected to reach $4.3 trillion dollars and comprise 19.5 percent of GDP. That means by 2017 $20 out of every $100 dollars spent in the United States will be on health care.

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The U.S. spends more as a percentage of GDP and per capita for health care than any other developed nation while nearly half, 45 percent, of all American patients do not receive the care they have been recommended. In addition, outcomes, quality of care and life expectancy all score lower in the U.S. than the rest of the developed world.

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In August 2008, U.S. steelmakers accounted for only 5 percent of global steel output compared to 49 percent for Chinese steelmakers.

U.S. military spending represented 46 percent of $1.46 trillion global military spending in 2008, compared with 5.8 percent for China, the United Kingdom and France at 4.5 percent and Russia at 4 percent.

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American oil imports since 1981 have nearly doubled, up by 96 percent. 1981 was two years after the second oil crisis that severely affected the U.S. economy and led to repeated calls for energy independence.

The United States currently sends more than $1 billion dollars per day overseas to buy foreign oil.

There are 15,000 registered lobbyists in America who spent $3.5 billion dollars influencing elected officials in 2009.

Including money spent for grassroots organizing, coalition-building, advertising and advocacy on the internet with the $3.5 billion spent on lobbying, the total spent in 2009 on purchasing influence in Washington was about $9 billion dollars.

In 2008, the U.S. had 37 universities in the top 100 and 58 in the top 200. In 2009, that dropped to 32 and 54, respectively.

55 percent of U.S. PhD engineering students are foreign born, along with 45 percent of graduate physicists working in the U.S.

More than 30 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology between 1901 and 2005 were foreign born.

More than two thirds of Americans are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity.

Nine out of ten Americans do not understand radiation and what it can do to the body.

One in five American adults is convinced that the sun revolves around the earth.

Among adult Americans, between 1989 and 2007 Americans knowledge of current events dropped by 8.3 percent.

Among adult Americans, 25 percent cannot name any First Amendment rights and 62 percent cannot name the three branches of the United States government.

Of Americans age 18-24, 74 percent believe English is the primary language spoken by the most people in the world; 48 percent cannot locate the state of Mississippi on a U.S. map; 47 percent cannot locate India on a map of Asia; 75 percent cannot locate Israel on a map of the Middle East; 70 percent cannot locate North Korea on a map of Asia; 60 percent cannot locate Iraq on a map and 33 percent cannot locate the direction “northwest.”

Overall, about 67 percent of American high school seniors read below the proficient level.

Fewer than half of Americans over age 13 read a book in the last year.

Romance novels are the largest share of the American book market.

One in seven American adults cannot read. That equates to 14 percent or 32 million U.S. adults who are illiterate.

In the Los Angeles city school system during 2008-2009, 58 percent of fifth-graders were reading below their grade level and 47 percent could not perform at their grade level in math.

American children aged 2-5 spend about 25 hours watching live television and over 32 hours a week on average in front of the TV screen.

American children aged 6-11 spend about 22 hours watching live television and over 28 hours a week on average in front of the TV screen.

American adults spend an average of 8 hours per day exposed to television, 56 hours per week

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But a list of factoids does not tell the whole story. While possibly illuminating, they lack personal perspective. As such, consider the following series of quotes, and the implications of these quotes, all of which will combine in the coming decade:

“The physical infrastructure of big East Coast cities was mainly built by the 1880s; of the industrial Midwest by World War I; and of the West Coast by 1960. It was advertised to last 50 years, and over-engineered so it might last 100. Now it’s running down. When a pothole swallows an SUV, it’s treated as freak news, but it shows a water system that’s literally collapsing beneath us.” – Stephen Flynn

“After almost a century, the United States no longer has the money. It is gone, and it is not likely to return in the foreseeable future … The American standard of living will decline relative to the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world … The United States will lose power and influence.” – economists J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen

“America needs a government as good as its people.” – former President Jimmy Carter

“Year by year special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state.” – paraphrase of Mancur Olson, author, economist and social scientist

“153 state or federal [elected] positions in California were at stake in the 2004 election. Not a single one changed party.” – Troy Senik, author and former presidential speechwriter

“In terms of size, speed and directional flow, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way — roughly from West to East — is without precedent in modern history.” – Thomas Fingar, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC)

“I don’t think that America’s political system is equal to the tasks before us… Our [system] is great for distributing benefits but has become weak at facing problems. I know the power of American rejuvenation, but if I had to bet, it would be 60–40 that we’re in a cycle of decline.”  – Dick Lamm, former three-term governor of Colorado (Democrat)

“If Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?” – Texas governor Rick Perry (Republican) regarding Texas secession from the United States

“Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Democratic party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country—that’s not going to work too well. For [the Democratic party left,] it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.” – U.S. Senator Evan Bayh (Democrat, Indiana)

“He was Judas to the Republican Party in the state of Florida and across the country.” – Robin Stublen, co-state coordinator for the Florida Tea Party Patriots, regarding moderate Republican Florida governor Charles “Charlie” Crist

“To those people who are pursuing purity, you’ll become a club not a party. Conservativism is an asset. Blind ideology is not.” – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican, South Carolina)

“Our companies and entrepreneurs are matchless in their power to adapt. We lead in many categories the private economy can handle by itself. But where you need any public-private coordination, we’ve become handicapped. I worry that our companies can adapt, but our [political] system can’t.” – Robert Atkinson, director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

“Senior foreign government delegations still frequent the U.S. on technology visits, but they come increasingly infrequently to the U.S. to learn about innovation policy; there’s much more for them to learn in Europe and Asia.” – Greg Tassey, senior economist for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

“We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.” – Thomas Friedman, columnist and author

“The financial crisis is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe… [It will] accelerate trends that are shifting the world’s center of gravity away from the United States.” – Robert Altman, former Deputy Treasury Secretary

“We are willfully making ourselves stupid. When was the last time we faced up to a major national problem? We would do well to focus on the issue of public paralysis.” – Ralph Nader, former third party presidential candidate, consumer activist, author

“This is a phenomenon that goes beyond the military sphere to the political and economic sphere. I think it would be easy for common-sense Americans to draw up a list of big things that would seem to demand concerted effort. Deficits are too big. Health costs are unacceptable. Oil. And yet we have a political system that seems to be constantly consumed with trivial things. We cannot seriously grapple with the big issues. Tactics consume strategy.” – Andrew Bacevich,  West Point graduate and career Army officer who now teaches at Boston University

“Ronald Reagan managed to equate criticism with anti-Americanism, and render unintelligible bad news about America.” – Rick Perlstein, author, historian and journalist

“Ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.” – Bill Moyers, journalist, former White House press secretary

“Governing institutions always lag behind the social exigencies of any era; and in periods of rapid change… the gap widens between society’s needs and the institutional capacity to meet those needs.” – paraphrase of Thorstein Veblen, author, sociologist and economist

“Through the country’s history, government has had to function correctly for the private sector to flourish. John Quincy Adams built the lighthouses and the highways. That’s not ‘socialist’ but ‘Whiggish.’ Now we need ports and highways and an educated populace.” – Kevin Starr, author, historian, professor

“America’s ignorance of the outside world is so great as to constitute a threat to national security.” – Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad

“Part of the mind-set of pre-Communist China was the rage and frustration of a great people let down by feckless rulers. Whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership, [domestically] it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away. America is not going to have a Communist revolution nor endure “100 Years of Humiliation,” as Imperial China did. But we could use more anger about the fact that the gap between our potential and our reality is opening up, not closing.” – James Fallows, writer, journalist, former presidential speech writer

“The world has no leadership. The U.S. was the last resort and hope for all the nations. Today, we have lost that hope.” – Lech Walesa, former president of Poland and leader of Poland’s independence movement from the Soviet Union

“Our long-term simulations show that absent policy changes the federal government faces an unsustainable growth in debt. The longer that action to deal with the federal government’s long-term fiscal outlook is delayed, the greater the risk that the eventual changes will be disruptive and destabilizing.” – United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) [emphasis added]

“I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.” – Paul Otellini, President and CEO, Intel

 *******

As you can see from these facts and quotes, the United States faces a set of challenges that, taken together, arriving simultaneously, threaten the ongoing viability of the country.

Facing a period of extraordinary challenge is nothing new for the United States. The nation has faced challenges before and overcome them.

What makes this next decade unique is that the country faces major existential challenges from multiple sources, all arriving at the same time, at a time when the country is perhaps less equipped to deal with them than at any other point in its history.

Government
Politically, the nation is at a standstill. Its ruling class has proven, through its pervasive corruption and extremist driven gridlock, that it is incapable of effective governance, long ago trading power and personal riches for any sense of civic responsibility and personal integrity. Government is at a standstill, held hostage by fringe ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum.

The underlying political system of exchanging money for influence that the ruling political class has inculcated and nurtured has created an environment universally corrosive to anyone who enters. People who are elected to local, state and national offices may start out well meaning and honest, but they quickly become introduced to the realities of politics in America in which there is only one goal—money.

The United States spends more on buying influence with politicians ($9 billion) than it does for flood control and coastal emergencies ($30 million); mining ($146 million); training law enforcement ($278 million); health care research and quality ($611 million); the forest service ($757 million); military family housing ($1,822 million); technology innovation ($80 million); adult education ($612 million); radioactive waste management ($197 million); elderly housing ($274 million); fighting organized crime ($579 million); veterans employment and training ($262 million); the Peace Corps ($446 million); pipeline and hazardous materials safety ($174 million); financial crimes enforcement ($100 million); veterans cemeteries ($251 million); polluted land assessment and cleanup ($138 million); aeronautics, aerospace and science education ($146 million); science research equipment and facilities ($165 million); small business loans ($169 million); social security fraud and abuse ($106 million) and social innovation ($60 million) combined ($7.403 billion).

Given these priorities of the political class, with the nation spending more on buying politicians than buying government products and services, it is clear who our elected representatives and their parties serve—themselves.

Fewer than half of Americans trust government, more than 80 percent disapprove of the job congress is doing, 83 percent are dissatisfied or angry with government and more than 93 percent believe there is too much partisan fighting between the two ineffective, detached and self-serving political parties. There are loud voices from many quarters, left, right and center, echoing the message that the current political system and its members have proven incapable of governing the country and that the elected representatives of the United States are disconnected from honesty, integrity, ethics, the country and its people.

Tellingly, for the first time in modern history, there are reports from developed nations of concern of “political instability” in the United States.

If we don’t fix government, if we don’t create a system that separates money from politics, if we don’t find people who are honest enough and capable enough to govern, it is game over.

Finances
Financially, the nation is effectively bankrupt. The United States government has spent more money that it earned for 47 out of the last 55 years. Consequently, it is in debt up past its eyeballs; and, worse yet, it is in hock to its major geopolitical rivals, who now control America’s fate. About one in three dollars of U.S. foreign debt is held by China, drug cartels and oil producers. China alone holds more than $895 billion dollars in U.S. debt, more than 24 percent of the total held by foreign nations.

“China is now the largest creditor nation to the United States,” noted Victor Gao, a former top official in the Chinese foreign ministry, in a recent CNN interview. “Just imagine if China buys less of the Treasury bonds or stops buying the Treasury bond for a couple of months.” The outcome of even a couple of months diminishment or suspension of China buying America’s IOUs would cripple the U.S. economy and destroy the dollar. It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out who is the puppet and who is holding the strings in this relationship.

Things won’t get better financially any time soon. If things stay the way they are, in seven years the U.S. will be spending 20 of every 100 dollars on health care. Even more ominous, the United States has no way to pay for its major social entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Unless major cuts are made to the entitlement programs, huge tax increases are levied, or both, in 10 years the country will be spending all of its revenues, every last penny of taxes, duties, fees, etc., to fund those entitlement programs and pay the interest on the public debt, leaving nothing left to pay for the entire rest of the government (defense, law enforcement, safety, education, science, etc.).

If we can’t gain control of health care costs, if we can’t come to grips with our spending and stop racking up more and more debt, if we can’t get our entitlement programs under control, in ten years it is game over.

Geopolitics
Geopolitically, America’s dominant position on the world stage is being displaced by rising global superpowers such as China and resurging past empires such as Russia (Soviet Union) and Iran (Persia).

China is America’s primary debt holder, and, as such, has the power of life and death over the United States. Should China simply stop buying further IOUs from the United States or flood the market with even a portion of its U.S. debt holdings, the U.S. economy and the dollar would collapse. While that collapse would cost the Chinese most of their nearly trillion dollars in U.S. debt holdings, even if they lost every penny of their investment, they could crush the United States and become the world’s sole superpower for less than it has cost the U.S. to fight the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. China would become the world’s sole superpower for a relatively bargain price, all without firing a shot.

Asians in general, and the Chinese in particular, have a very different perspective on history than the United States. Asians plan in periods of 10, 50 and 100 years. Americans plan in periods of 3 months and two year election cycles. Asians view history in periods of hundreds and thousands of years. Americans view history in periods of 30 minutes, the news cycle, and four years, a presidential term.

Due to this difference in perspective, it can come as a surprise to Americans that Asia, predominantly China, was by far the world’s largest economy for much of the last two millennia. As pointed out by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, China was the globe’s top economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages and fought disastrous religious wars, while North America was populated by indigenous peoples, while the Islamic world peaked and declined, Asia and China created the largest economies and the highest standards of living in the world.

 
From our perspective here within the United States fishbowl we tend to think the world is, should be, and always will be, as it has been since we’ve been alive. However, from the Chinese perspective, the idea of China dominating the world is not a change in reality to something unusual; it is merely the return to what always was and always should be.

China’s current geographical area

China’s recent geographical area

Maximum territory during the Mongol Empire
 

The world outside the borders of the United States continues to evolve rapidly. Due to the growth and development of other nations, it is inevitable that the U.S. will no longer dominate relative to their growing strengths and capabilities. Just as the first tree that grows towers above the newer growth, as the surrounding saplings grow to maturity, they stand equal with the initial tree. The return to global power and influence of historically major empires such as China and Russia (Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union), and to an initially lesser extent, Iran (Persian) and Turkey (Ottoman), means the U.S. must adapt to a new role and new relationships with a multilateral world of countries with current or soon-to-be peer level economies and capabilities. This does not mean that the U.S. must decline relative to itself, but it does mean that the U.S. must find within itself an identity and purpose relevant to and compatible with a new world of multiple major geopolitical players.

If we cannot find a way to transition into a new geopolitical order as one of many powerful nations, if we cannot find a way to get out of debt to our major global competitors, if we cannot find a way to form and sustain effective coalitions, it is game over.

Education
Educationally, in 2006 American 15 year old students ranked 23rd in science and 32nd in math among developed and developing countries on the OCED Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) education skills survey. In 2009 American fourth graders were surpassed by five countries that placed behind the U.S. in earlier reading tests.

From 1990 to 2006, total expenditures per student in American public elementary and secondary schools rose 31 percent in constant dollars. That 31 percent increase in spending bought a change of 38 percent to 33 percent of fourth graders reading at or below basic level, 31 to 26 percent of eighth graders reading at or below basic level, and more than one out of four freshmen who never graduate high school, a drop out rate of 27 percent nationally. 

In some quarters those statistics, a range of one quarter to one third of fourth and eighth graders who cannot read above a basic level and more than one quarter of high school students dropping out, were a cause for celebration and accolades. Others were less sanguine.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan perhaps said it best, “Our students have stagnated educationally, putting our long-term economic security at risk.”

If we cannot find a way to educate our young to produce effective, intelligent, flexible, problem-solving workers and citizens, it is game over.

Information
All of these problems coming to a head simultaneously would perhaps be less of an existential threat if the American public could meet the requirements of a representative democracy: an engaged, educated and informed electorate.

Given the duplicity, greed and incompetence of the ruling class, it is extremely challenging to be engaged. Considering the ongoing failure of the education system to produce capable citizens fully informed of how the world and their government works, one is hard pressed to make a case for educated. And lastly, though we are literally drowning in information, the electorate is perhaps less effectively and accurately informed than at any time in the nation’s history.

In 2009 there were more than 40,000 newspaper jobs cut. Since 2001, roughly 25 percent of the industry’s news workforce has been lost. This is not just an abstract issue, it can directly affect the nation on a societal level. For instance, Mary Schapiro, chairperson of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said, “It’s an absolute worry for me because I think financial journalists have in many cases been the sources of some really important enforcement cases and really important discovery of practices and products that regulators should be profoundly concerned about.”

As what remains of journalism that watched over politicians, financiers, defense department contractors, local governments and business withers away, it is being replaced by new forms of information procurement and dissemination. In addition to “citizen journalism” created by people with no training in discerning facts from rumor, whose level of perceived credibility is typically directly proportional to their level of bombast, there is now “journalism” based on stories assigned to yield maximum popularity and advertising sales. 

For instance, AOL is launching “the newsroom of the future” in which reporters are assigned stories based on what is popular on the web and what will attract the most advertising. According to Business Week, stories are frequently assigned to explore such popular topics as “How to Open Champagne.” There are plans to pay reporters bonuses based on web page views instead of the quality, accuracy, relevance and impact of the content they create. Given a choice between creating a story on a Hollywood celebrity guaranteed to attract millions of page views and a story on congressional bribery, there is little doubt which story a reporter trying to make their rent and car payments will choose.

What this means is that the average American will be left with the info-celebrities and shrieking ideologues that populate television; the write-what’s-popular web based “journalism;” and “citizen journalism”  consisting primarily of hyper-partisan zombies repeating the same rumors, distortions, lies and half-truths they picked up from another hyper-partisan blog. Given that mix, it is extremely challenging, if not essentially impossible, for a voter to stay informed in anything close to a non-partisan, balanced manner.

While the entire world’s collection of information and up-to-the-second news feeds are as close as the average American’s smartphone, accurate, unbiased, unfiltered, un-agenda-ed, fact-based information is the rarest of all commodities. Like a castaway’s water on a desert island, we have never been surrounded by more information only a touch away, with more of it completely useless and counterproductive.

If we cannot find a way to keep ourselves informed and educated via unbiased, accurate, fact-based, reliable information sources that we can easily access and identify in the overwhelming chaos of available information, and use those information sources to make effective and informed decisions about our lives and our nation, it is game over.

Leadership
For at least 450 years, Europe dominated the world, moving from systematic rape and plunder of the globe to repeated, all encompassing, internecine attempts to destroy each other along with the known world. Once the Europeans finally burned themselves out, literally and figuratively, the United States spent the last half of the 20th century, its brief moment of world leadership, degenerating into a political pig sty and shallow materialism. All of the good things America did in the world during that period, from defending allies, such as winning the Cold War, to feeding the world, such as supplying India with donated food after its independence, were outweighed by America’s long spiral down into political ineffectiveness, cultural arrogance and profligate spending.

As former U.S. Representative Charles Wilson (Democrat, Texas), of Charlie Wilson’s War fame, said of the 1950s, “We were undisputedly the kings of the world, and everybody knew it. We were arrogant sons of bitches.”

That attitude and its manifestations did not pass from the memory of the world along with the era of Elvis. American foreign policies reflecting that ethos are long remembered, and remain a raw nerve for other nations. It is telling that while people in the rest of the world nearly uniformly admire and like Americans, many are hostile to U.S. government foreign policies. The legacy of “kings of the world; arrogant sons of bitches” as national foreign policy still haunts today.

Even as the U.S. carried that burden into the current era and perpetuated it by creating new versions of the attitude and foreign policies to match, the world continued to change around us. Although American society and its leaders largely assumed that everything outside the borders had remained static since Ozzie and Harriet and that the outside world largely remained in fealty, in reality, the rest of the world had rapidly advanced and changed. Those advancements and changes gave rise to a set of new challenges that the United States was dramatically unprepared for on nearly all levels. Most importantly, those decades of predominantly willful “ignorance is bliss” outlook about the rest of the world led the United States to elect and perpetuate a governing class that was entirely incapable of leading the nation in a changed, post black-and-white-television world.

The defining moment of America’s post-war world and national leadership was the greatest missed opportunity for vision and leadership in modern political history. Immediately after 9/11 the United States, from political ruling class to nearly every single citizen, stood united and ready to take on any challenge. The nation was briefly open and receptive to fundamental change and stood poised to adopt and push forward a Manhattan project, an Apollo moon shot, a defining transformative initiative of our age. Instead of being challenged to accomplish something meaningful, something ambitious, something dramatic that would fundamentally improve the country and its people for today and the future, such as energy independence, then President George W. Bush asked instead for us to go shop.

There could be no better example of the void of leadership, vision and capability of the governing class of the United States, regardless of political party, regardless of ideology, than that mandate: go shop. There could be no better illustration of what passes for both political leadership and what is guaranteed to be appealing to the American people: go shop. There could be no better lesson in the political class’s choice between challenging goals that move the nation forward and meaningless populist drivel enticing to the masses: go shop. There could be no better sample of what is viewed among the ruling class as capitalizing on a once in multiple generations opportunity for a fundamental leap forward for the nation, the chance to leverage a brief moment of unity and potential sense of national purpose: go shop. There was a tiny window of opportunity to elevate the national purpose of America from materialism to a higher plane, such as guaranteeing a viable future for our children and grandchildren. Instead, the political class, the ruling class, trotted out the best they could muster: go shop.

If we cannot instill, identify and develop leadership, leadership capable of understanding the world as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be in some utopian form; if we cannot bring forth leadership with vision, courage and integrity, leadership willing and able to lead the nation for the sake of leadership alone; then it is game over.

A Perfect Storm
In the coming decade, the United States faces a perfect storm of financial disruption, geopolitical tectonic shifts, technology transformation, energy transition, public health, workforce education, ideological extremism, lack of leadership and pervasive political corruption and ineptitude.

It is clear from their track record over the last 50 years that the current political class of the United States is not equipped with the ethics, integrity, intelligence and skills required to take on, meet and overcome these challenges.

Countless times over the brief history of the United States the people of the country have proven themselves capable of rising to any challenge, especially if given even a modicum of leadership. It remains to be seen if in its current state of health, education, awareness and priorities the people of the United States can set aside the trivial distractions of their lives and pay attention long enough to meet and overcome this decade’s existential challenges for their country.

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps more than any other politician of his time or since, recognized that the United States is not the permanent fixture that we assume it to be simply because it’s always been the way it is during our lifetimes. Lincoln recognized that the U.S. was a novel and new experiment in citizen self-government, in representative democracy. He perceived that the United States is much more fragile, much more brittle, than we consider it today. He also realized that without tremendous levels of ongoing effort by both its citizens and its elected representatives, the republic would founder.

Perhaps Lincoln never forgot the words of his predecessor as President, John Adams, who said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

It remains to be seen if we as a people have the foresight and fortitude of Lincoln, who fought for and preserved the United States, or if we allow our corrupt, incompetent ruling class and a distracted, disinterested population to drive us to the collective societal suicide of Adams.

*******

“… that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” – Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

*******

Sources: 

• United States Government Accountability Office (GAO)
• United States Treasury
• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• U.S. Department of Education
• Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
• Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
• Federal Reserve
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• United Nations
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
• RAND Corporation 
• University of Chicago
• University of Texas 
• Stanford University
• American University’s Centre for Congressional and Presidential Studies
• Pew Research Center 
• Center For Responsive Politics www.opensecrets.org 
• New York Times
• San Jose Mercury News
• Asia Sentinel 
• Journal of the American Medical Association
• Foreign Policy
• The Economist
• The Atlantic
• U.S. News and World Report
• Business Week 
• Associated Press
• POLITICO
• Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile
• The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
• American Society of Civil Engineers
• Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
• Legatum Institute
• Bowker
• China Mining Federation 
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
• NAFSA Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad
• Nielsen Company 
• National Geographic Society 
• National Endowment for the Arts 
• National Constitution Center 
• Romance Writers of America
• Gallup
• Roper Public Affairs
• NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll
• ABC News
• CBS News 
• CNN

More than 70 percent of corporate change efforts fail.

Humans hate change.

It’s a simple fact of life. There isn’t any easy way around it. In general, humans hate change.

That rule extends beyond individuals into groups of humans: families, tribes, organizations, companies, communities and nations. Humans hate change.

As individuals and groups, we tend to get locked into a way of doing things, a set of perceptions and a set of expectations. Anything that forces us to change anything about what we consider normal is usually resisted.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence for the need for change, we will resist change. For example, the majority of people who suffer heart attacks do not make long term changes in their lifestyles to eliminate or limit factors that contribute to heart disease. In other words, even when it’s a matter of life and death, humans hate change so much they won’t change even to save their own lives.

There are university degree programs in change management; multiple national and global professional associations of practicing change management consultants; countless thousands of trained, certified and degreed change management practitioners and a cornucopia of books, videos, workshops and tutorials on implementing change. In spite of all this learning and all these resources, there has been relatively little improvement in change rates in humans or groups of humans.

Why is this so?

The reason humans and groups of humans are so poor at making changes is that there is actually a very small window of opportunity for change in humans and groups of humans.

Most people and organizations consider themselves open to change. You could not begin to count the number of leaders who promote a culture of openness to change and constant improvement. Although this makes for good public relations, in reality, humans and groups of humans are typically open to and accepting of change only during a very small portion of time relative to their overall existence.

(click for larger image)

The lifecycle of humans and groups of humans, such as companies and countries, consists of cycles, cyclic periods of relative growth and shrinkage. During these cycles, humans and groups of humans such as companies and countries spend most of their time blocked off from being open to and accepting of change.

During growth periods, humans, companies and countries are in the cocoon of the Curse of Success. Everything is going great, so there is no need to be open to any external inputs, regardless of source. It is useless to attempt to provide advice, guidance or predictions of future challenges to humans, companies or countries during this period. From their perspective, they are succeeding, so they have no need of improvement; they are obviously the single and sole source of their success, so others have nothing to offer that could possibly be of value to them.

When growth slows, complacency sets in. Humans, companies and countries consider this a brief lull before inevitable growth returns. They use this period to relax and recover from the exertions of the high growth period. Again, it is useless to attempt to provide any suggestions for improvements or warnings of coming challenges during this period. From their point of view, they just had a huge run of success. If anyone should be offering advice, it is they who should be instructing others; their success had nothing to do with external factors or the overall environment; success was due to their unique combination of talents and abilities.

When things turn downward, humans, companies and countries engage in a long period of denial. During this period they attempt to apply solutions to past problems to the new challenges they face. They will continue to cycle through previous solutions to past problems until they pass through the baseline. Only then will they consider the possibility that they are facing new challenges that their old solutions won’t overcome.

Once they are well and truly lower than the baseline where they started, they will panic and desperately apply any possible solution in an effort to return to the sweet days of growth and the lazy afternoons of complacency. This period is when individuals, companies and countries attempt “silver bullet” solutions, magic cures and radical reorganizations, often leading to outright failure. This period is a fertile market for purveyors of quackery, flim-flam artists, con men and get-rich-quick schemes on the individual and small group level and seemingly simple solutions to complex problems at the large group to country scale.

If they survive the panic phase, they will finally, albeit briefly, be open to and accepting of real change.

Real change requires real work. It requires real changes in processes, perceptions, activities, structures and organization. As such, humans and groups of humans attempt to limit the amount of real change as much as possible. During this period, they are enthusiastic about the concepts of change, but very resistant to fully adopting and implementing the nuts-and-bolts reality of complete change. If they succeed in not fully changing, they guarantee that they will revisit the downward slope and panic phase shortly.

As soon as humans and groups of humans sense a shift in direction from plunging ever downward to leveling out, change stops. Lip service, platitudes and posters regarding change may still linger, but real change, complete change, ceases immediately.

The next step in the cycle is incorrect attribution of causality. For individuals or groups that survive the terrifying dive to near oblivion only to pull up just as they were staring directly at disaster, the only possible cause of their success is themselves. They immediately begin the process of self-congratulation and self-reinforcement of all the things they did right to save themselves. As they begin to experience growth, this loop becomes self-enabling, self-certifying and self-accelerating. The more they experience success, the more entrenched the legends of how they survived and triumphed over adversity become. The long drop off the cliff, the panic, the terror all fade into dim memories as they pass upward through the baseline and wall themselves off in the cocoon of the Curse of Success.

And the cycle begins anew.

As you can see, the window of opportunity, the period of time, when people are open to and accepting of change is actually extremely limited. That is the reason why humans and groups of humans are so miserable at effecting change in their lives, their tribes, their communities, their companies and their countries.

Where are you in this cycle?

Where is your tribe, your community and your company in this cycle?

And, of critical importance right now, where is your country in this cycle?

*******

Sources:

• Texas A&M University
• Harvard Business Review
• Canadian Medical Association
• Enterprise Group, Ltd. www.egltd.com

It reads:

“As a business management consultant I heard a lot about priorities. In the introductory meeting and group management team interviews, senior executives would drone on endlessly about the organization’s priorities. Top priority this and critical priority that; it was all I could do to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.

If the senior executives started down that same path in my personal, one-on-one, interviews I would usually cut them off and say, ‘Don’t tell me about your priorities, show me your budget.’

People, teams, groups, tribes and organizations often make a big show of pontificating about their priorities. Very rarely does the investment of their resources reflect their stated priorities.

It comes down to fundamental honesty – honesty with yourself, with your team, with your organization, with your business. It is one thing to spout about priorities. It is another to live them.

Show me your budget.”

The same is true of countries. Their leaders and citizens often pontificate about the priorities of their society, but the truth is revealed in what they invest their resources in, especially their financial resources.

The New York Times posted a wonderful interactive graphic that illustrates the current 2010 budget and the proposed 2011 budget here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

The various boxes are sized proportional to the amount of money allocated for that particular category of spending. The bigger the box, the more money invested there.

(click image for larger size)

As you can see, social security and defense are the two biggest boxes in the 2010 budget. Everything else gets less money.

By positioning your cursor over various segments of the graphic on the New York Times web site, you can see how much money has been allocated for various departments and programs of the U.S. government.

(click image for larger size)

In this case, I positioned my cursor over the higher education budget segment and its details displayed, including the delta between the current 2010 budget and the administration’s proposed 2011 budget for that expense category.

It’s interesting to compare the budgeted amounts to what most people would consider reasonable priorities for their country.

For instance, most people would consider an investment in education to be a priority. After all, if we don’t produce educated citizens, we won’t have a viable and relevant work force to contribute to the tax base, much less be part of an informed, engaged electorate. Nevertheless, you can see that all of education is a pretty small box, and as illustrated, what is set aside for higher education is a pittance compared to the overall budget, a mere .0628 percent of our overall spending.

Considering the precarious state of the world, others might consider energy independence to be a national priority. Since we send more than one billion dollars a day overseas for imported oil and an unknown portion of that billion dollars a day is used to fund groups whose primary purpose is to kill us, energy independence seems a reasonable and desirable goal and an area worthy of sustained investment. It’s interesting then, taken in the context of more than thirty five years of president after president and congressional leader after congressional leader stressing the need to achieve energy independence that right now we are investing less than 1 percent of our spending to achieve that goal, .0933 percent, to be exact.

Given this ongoing reality, a cynic might suggest that the politicians are not really interested in achieving energy independence, and instead are a lot more interested in pocketing millions of dollars in influence payments, errr, of course I meant so say campaign contributions, from the oil industry. But I digress.

I encourage you to click on the link to the New York Time’s interactive graphic http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp and move your cursor over the various boxes to learn what money is actually spent on various programs.

Pick your priority, whether food safety ($1.02 billion, .0283% of total spending), refugee programs ($1.74 billion, .0483%), Medicare health care fraud and abuse control ($1.2 billion, .0333%), homeless assistance ($1.85 billion, .0514%), disease control ($6.24 billion, .1733%), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ($4.44 billion, .1233%), mass transit ($8.36 billion, .2322%) or any other category. I think you will share my reaction to what we would consider to be our national priorities versus what we actually spend our money on.

Are we investing in what we need to invest in for a vibrant today and a better tomorrow?

When returning to the United States from the 43 countries I’ve visited, one thing that stands out is that just about everywhere else I’ve been in the world that country had a strong sense of national purpose. In some countries it is palpable, so thick you can cut it with a knife. However, when I return I realize that there is no sense of that here because America has no national purpose. There is nothing that this country is working to achieve; there is no direction this country is moving in; there is no goal that this country is striving to reach. Compared to other countries the lack of national purpose here is haunting, troubling and does not bode well. If you are not heading somewhere, you go nowhere.

That reality is reflected in this interactive graphic. While everyone from the politicians to your neighbor on the bar stool talks boldly about what our national priorities are, those priorities are not in any way reflected in how we spend our national budget.

You can tell me what your priorities are all you want, but in the end, when I want to really know what your priorities are, just show me your budget.

It turned out to be one of the most popular essays of that era. 

We put up a Christmas tree last week for the first time since then. It was amazing to realize it had been five years since we’d either been in town or had a home to place a tree in.

This year’s Christmas tree resembles the tree in The Seekers. The only difference is that we’ve since collected so many objects from additional places around the world, there is no longer room for any balls, only lights and ornaments.

Otherwise, the story remains the same. You can read it here: http://www.hackneys.com/travel/seekers-12.pdf

.