Yea, the only thing that separates us from every other empire that has come and gone is that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. Even if we lose our economic standing among the worlds leading nations, we'll still have more than enough nuclear and biological weapons to ever be threatened by another country who wishes to invade us. However, economically our current predicament has been a long time in the coming. What made America a great economic power to begin with was its size and the use of slave labor, natural resources, industry, and the cotton gin to produce a tremendous surplus of exports from which we derived our wealth from. Following slavery, industry was still a major driving force that continued to help us grow and expand, especially once forms of transportation like the rail road came around. What got us in trouble and started the Great Depression was the Stock Market. People were playing a game of monopoly with money that didn't really exist, so when it came time for people to pay up there was no money to be had. Similarly what drove us over the edge recently was the housing market, partly because so many people were mortgaging homes that they couldn't realistically afford, so when they foreclosed that money was gone (not to mention the shady trading practices with debt and all that other good stuff).Following WWII we were able to get out of the depression because there was another big industrial boom (as everyone had either participated in the war or worked in factories to support the war effort). Since that time, we have slowly but steadily lost the great industrial power we once had; almost everything of quality that we buy today, from electronics to cars, is produced in other countries. The fact that we acquired trillions of dollars of debt over an eight year time period is going to set us back decades before we return to where we were at in 2000. As of now we don't really have much of an industry (GM is a fine example of American industry today). However, if we could become the leading country in renewable energy technologies, that may provide us with an industry to help us recover (if it were on a massive scale like the war effort, and not just of itself alone).We have overcome worse times before (like the Great Depression), but people back then were of a tougher breed and had a strong work ethic. A lot of people today are obese, stupid, and lazy; a sharp contrast to what was socially acceptable in those days. I have faith that this won't be the end, but if our society continues to decline the way it has, while electing terrible leaders that undue all the progress of the last President, then our not too distant future looks pretty bleak.
