Many well known business people and economists are currently predicting 2-3 years. Hope you're right and they're wrong, but I'll be planning for it to occur much sooner than after five decades. :-)
Tell y'all something else, if O gets his way on this, he'll be embolden and you just thought he was being a horse's behind before. You haven't seen nuttin' yet...
Actually, I hope you are right and I am wrong. Because the sooner this happens, the better off we will be to re-build. The Soviets faked their economy by monetary manipulation, fuzzy math and cooked books. It took 50 years before they actually couldn't write a check to somebody.
Right now we are printing money like mad and manipulating currency through interest rates and such. We are cooking the books on everything from unemployment to GDP. We're only just getting started in this next phase of America. Our government can hide lots of stuff from us now. They control us. They can play these games and milk our economy to stay in power right up until a social security check is NO GOOD! If it takes 50 years, like the soviet union, we won't have a strong base of capitalists to jump in and re-invigorate an economy. They'll all be long dead by a generation and we'll have a nation of dead-beat entitlement enablers. America will have squandered our legacy by then and we'll never have any hope of regaining the pride and vigor that built this nation. By then, there will be nothing to fight for. The very definition of Freedom is changing by the day now. In 50 years we won't even remember what freedom once was and our nations history will be outlawed as contraband propaganda. AND WE'LL VOTE FOR IT ALL IN THE NAME OF SECURITY.
So yea! I hope for a collapse soon while those American innovators and patriots are still alive with energy and vigor. We have to hope it happens while John Gault(s) are still among us.