America in denial: We're number 29

you're getting your news from al jazera? otoh, obama keeps calling us 'the greatest nation on earth', 'the richest nation on earth', 'the most powerful nation on earth'. so, we must be, right?

 

Al Jezera is actually far more reliable than any American news agency.

As long as the vast majority of Americans believe in American exceptionalism, we will continue to head down the shitter. The first step to recovery is acknowledging a problem, we aren't there yet.

 

That may or may not be true, but let's stipulate that it is....
Does that mean that they're an accurate source?

 

I would suspect Richard could find different sources to back up the credibility.

Personally, I think the American Dream is being challenged right now.

Take a look at the ranking of the Human Development Index or HDI of the nations...on the surface, America is doing well > List of countries by Human Development Index - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I agree about the challenge. That list's meaningfulness suffers as a result of using an "index based on the gross national income (GNI) in purchasing power parity per capita". Purchasing parity per capita is a mean purchasing power parity. So much of our nations wealth is in the hands of the ubber rich 1% that you need to use the median instead of the mean to get an idea how the general population is doing.

 

^ in regards to the Al Jezera article, I'd bet a number of diverse articles at Ed Wallace's Inside Automotive do agreee with the AJ article right now as we post.

 

Have to accept and prepare for that at some point countries do not face reality and go down. The US today using 50% more energy per capita and per GDP dollar than other developed nations while paying $500B per year in an oil import tax and squandering $1.4T per year for military to secure foreign oil supplies we do not need. An example of a country that is declining rapidly because it does not deal effectively with nations problems.

We have had one political party dead set against US increasing its energy efficiency and dead set on US spending $1.4T per year in a fruitless effort to control oil supplies in the Middle. This has crippled US efforts to deal with single biggest threat to US national security, US energy inefficiency and the $2T per year it costs US economy and resulting decline in our schools, science and industry and loss of jobs.

 

How about the CIA as an information source? Here is their life expectancy chart:

CIA - The World Factbook

tl;dr 50th of 221.

 

^ the more metrics - the better, as they measure different things or give them different weight.

 

Has the American middle class been redefined - "permanent underclass"? Businessweek, WSJ has mentioned it. I beginning to think there maybe truth to this new definition.

DBCassidy