It’s hard to share the author’s optimism. He mentions several formerly Communist countries. But they each had undergone a revolution, or perhaps evolution since they weren’t violent, from a totally different political and economic system, while the U.S. is ever so slowly sliding into some form of quasi-socialism, and doing so evidently imperceptibly to the half of the voting electorate who voted for the card carrying Communist, and the half of total electorate who didn’t bother to vote at all. And those post-Communist countries are not all doing so well either.
A better, more accurate model of how a decline happens would be, I think, Argentina, once in the top five or six economies on the planet, before the lovely Peron couple showed up and mocked it all up so much that even a military coup couldn’t fix things up. We are becoming Argentina, as one Argentinian predicted on William F. Buckley’s TV show 30 years ago, and was casually dismissed by the ever smarter than thou William F. leaning way back in his chair. Argentina - a country of the poor and the very rich with the forever struggling middle class supporting both. Argentina is still limping along, and so will we.
Yes sir, I meant “mucked it up”, as I always mean what I intend to say!
I think an optimistic outlook would be Japan's lost decade. Unless we have a major economic reform that literally unleashes America's productivity (massive energy production, exploration, etc) OR an entirely new economic sector emerges (think the internet boom out of pretty much nothing), we could simply hope for a long, stagnation versus worst possibilities.