Do you agree that America has reached its “peak” and will soon be in decline to be replaced in the #1 position by China?

An article at quora.com by Jack Menendez, Born and raised in California.

For an example of how abysmal US political leadership is, one has to look no further than NASA. After 25 years of no political attention to space exploration, Bill Clinton decided to create an initiative that would take humans to Mars. Eight years later, George Bush canceled the Mars initiative and created a go back to the moon initiative. Eight years later, Obama canceled Bush’s moon initiative and created a new Mars initiative. Eight years later, Trump cancels Obama’s Mars initiative and creates a new going back to the moon initiative. This is 26 years of going nowhere but wasting billions of dollars and precious time. Meanwhile, the country that put people on the moon can no longer put humans into low Earth Orbit. The US pays the Russians to do it for them. This is our political leadership, folks!

OK, that is NASA, you say. No, it is not just NASA. The US government has accomplished basically nothing, anywhere since the end of the Cold War except create a mind-boggling amount of debt and more wars that accomplish absolutely zilch. We are now at the point where the infrastructure is failing, our government is broke, and climate change hangs like the Sword of Damocles above us. American Exceptionalism? Who are they kidding?

On the other hand, China has the Silk Road Initiative, in which they are spending Trillions on infrastructure to facilitate trade all over Asia. If the United States had thought this way, there would be rail and highway transiting the entire length of the Western Hemisphere. Riding to Patagonia from North America now requires a dirt bike and guts. The United States has spent 18 Trillion dollars on military toys and wars since the end of the Cold War, and nothing, zip, zero on its own people during that time.

Political leadership in the US is worse than non-existent. Consider that one party sabotages its own laws and the Constitutional Institution its members swear to uphold. The Republicans actively sabotage public education, the VA, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They do this because they don’t have the political power to cancel them. So they don’t vote enough funds for people to answer the telephones or administer the programs, strangling them so that Republicans can say that they don’t work. Who does this besides the US? Certainly not China.

The Democrats are a bunch of sellouts as bad as the Republicans. I will never get over the scene of Obama drinking Flint water. People say he was a good president. That thing that he did in Flint was more than anything, a cruel act, in the face of the people who had been poisoned, which he repeated with the Native Americans at Standing Rock. People do not count on American politicians. We were told that the Soviet Union was bad because the people served the government instead of the government serving the people. Well, who exactly does the US government serve?

Can you tell that I am pissed?

The USA is flailing around. The elite’s assumptions made about China were wrong. The Internet did not kill authoritarianism; the Chinese government learned to bend it to its advantage. Capitalism, it turns out, works fine without democracy and freedom, much to the American elite’s amazement. China is rising, and the US mistakes are coming back to haunt it.

So the elite in the US concluded that the whole freedom and democracy thing in the US is overrated and should be discarded in favor of China’s model. The Republicans put forward Donald Trump and mostly support him with total disregard for the institutions designed to protect freedom and democracy.

This is where the elites have made yet another giant miscalculation about China. They think that China’s government is like them, meaning: they think China’s government doesn’t give a rat’s ass about its own people. The elites in the US think that given the political power like the Communist Party in China has, they can do away with public education, health care, infrastructure, scientific research, care for the environment and instead have everything for themselves, quite the contrary to what China’s government is doing. The American elites think of stealing everything that’s not nailed down, including the National Park System. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is smart enough not to pillage their own country.

Look at what happened during the worldwide recession that started in the Winter of 2007. To keep people working, China’s government spent trillions of dollars on its infrastructure, including constructing a nationwide electrified high-speed rail system. Remember, China is roughly the size of the United States! What did the United States do? The United States handed trillions of dollars to the bankers who initially caused the problem and didn’t even scold them. So when we all came out on the other side of the recession, China hit the ground running, but the United States failed to address the problems for its most hurt population. This resulted in the election of Trump.

Yet, another giant mistake is being made. One party is trying to progress down the American way of doing things, as flawed as that might be. Meanwhile, the Republican party is trying to undermine the government and its institutions. It is civil war without the shooting, yet.

The only thing that could stop China is global warming. That is their true enemy other than the US. Global warming can and will destroy the Chinese economy even more so than the US.

The US and China have very different cultures. Without classical liberalism and the rule of law to hold them back, the American elites run rampant, taking everything they can grab that isn’t nailed down; it doesn’t matter who they hurt. US elites will destroy someone else hundred dollar bill if it means the elites can make one dollar doing it. They will pillage your pension fund, destroy the retirement for millions of people to make a few pennies on each dollar they destroy. In comparison, China has been very recently run by feudalism. They understand what can happen if there are no constraints. So while there may be abuses and corruption in China, they know better than loot their own society. The American elites don’t understand that. American elites are used to bending the law as much as they can get away with.

Update 1/31/2020: The deplorable leadership in Congress regarding NASA continues. A new Bill[1] would turn over control of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to Boeing. This is essentially a bailout for Boeing and would destroy any semblance of the healthy competition we see in private corporations providing space access. It is one of those examples of corruption that is eating the US alive.