This is my first thread/post. I am 59yo and grew up in America till the age of 23 when I emigrated to Australia (1983). I returned to America after a 35 year absence to look after my brother with Leukemia. I stayed for 3 months until my visa expired. Mostly traveled the southwest all the way to the west coast.
You know what it's like when you haven't seen someone in a long time? How different things appear...
The country I grew up in still has the same wonderful people, friendly, smiling and hard-working. But, I was shocked by the decaying infrastructure and the numbers of poor. Really shocked!
I would be interested in comments from forum members of similar age. Perhaps the analogy of the frog in boiling water applies... Your thoughts please.
This will be a little controversial here, but I think it started with Reaganomics, and the idea that "greed is good": that unrestricted profiteering would lead to a "trickle-down" effect, where the poor would benefit. But that didn't happen. The rich got richer, but the poor didn't benefit. During the Reagan years, the national debt tripled, and we became a debtor nation.
The "greed is good" mantra convinced many otherwise good Christian people (and later their children) that it was okay to forget the teachings of the Bible and become greedy, robbing their neighbors and cheating friends. It just became "good business". We saw the effects of this greed a generation later in the 2006 economic crisis, where millions lost their homes, but the richest just became richer, in part due to a huge loss of ethics in the finance world.
After Reaganomics, the policies of Bush and Clinton didn't rectify the track America was on. I think Perot could have turned things around, with his campaign to reduce the national debt, and his campaign against NAFTA, but once NAFTA was signed and millions of American jobs went overseas, we were screwed.
Bush Jr's endless "War on Terror", and Obama's continuation of that unwinnable war (after campaigning against it), further emptied America's coffers. Improvements to infrastructure that could have been made here in the US were instead spent overseas. I personally witnessed the closure of post offices, schools, and other local government, which helped keep local money local, in favor of more centralized systems, which led to the closure of local businesses as people drifted to larger, more prosperous areas, as Rural Flight eroded communities, especially in the Midwest, but elsewhere as well.
Trump is clueless, and will continue many of the same destructive policies: plenty of spending on the Military Industrial Complex, a continuation of the growth of the National Debt. This man, with his golden skyscrapers, is the very definition of Reagan's "greed is good" mantra. He's the very emblem of what has gone wrong in America financially.
