Whoever is elected: America will slide into decline

Although both Biden and Trump claim to be the best candidates for the presidency of the United States, the truth is that whoever is elected president of the United States is unlikely to save the United States, which is rapidly declining.

That's because America's decline is structural: the great empire's fiscal system, demographics, and ideology are all showing a clear and irreversible collapse, and its much-admired but extremely rigid system is inexorably accelerating this catastrophic process.

First, the U.S. fiscal system is in irreversible decline.

Since Bill Clinton took office as president, the US government's fiscal revenues have become increasingly strained, driven by the trend of globalization. According to a report by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, in 2003 alone, the U.S. corporate tax fell by 11.1% compared with the previous year, and by 2015, corporate tax revenue, which once accounted for nearly half of the total federal tax revenue in the United States, had fallen to only 10% On the other hand, with the global circulation of capital and the improvement of the tax avoidance system, the legal tax avoidance of the super-rich in the United States has become a common practice, which has seriously damaged the financial ability of the U.S. government.

In the face of a sharp decline in fiscal revenue, the U.S. government has had to rely on more debt-like tax revenues (such as Social Security and Medicare) to cover the fiscal shortfall. According to an August 2015 report by the U.S. Treasury Department, the federal government's social security tax has risen sharply from less than 10% to more than 30% – but this is tantamount to eating too much, and it also means that the U.S. social security tax will continue to increase as fiscal revenue decreases.

Moreover, the U.S. government's fiscal capacity is being devastated by the Obama administration's costly welfare programs, and during Obama's eight years in office, the U.S. federal government's debt has skyrocketed from $10 trillion to $20 trillion while the U.S. economy as a whole is improving, an extremely dangerous figure (assets of only 2.5 trillion). Shutdowns of the federal government and bankruptcy of local governments have become the norm, while spending on public programs (e.g., policing, scientific research) and military programs has been shrinking.

It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. fiscal system is taking on the characteristics of a late period of declining empires in history: that is, the government's fiscal capacity is rapidly depleted as the number of tax-paying individuals triggered by socio-economic trends declines, and the ability of vested interests to avoid taxes through the system. In the late Ottoman Empire, with the severance of the Mediterranean trade routes caused by the Great Voyage and the sharp increase in the tax-free mining of the aristocracy, the financial capacity of the imperial government was on the verge of collapse, so that it could not afford the expenditure of the army;

Historically, the destruction of great empires often began with the collapse of the financial system, whether it was the Ming Empire, which was cut off from the Chongzhen Dynasty, the Spanish Empire, which collapsed financially in the early 18th century, the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire in the late period, and the Soviet Union, which begged from the West before its collapse, all showed signs of decline with financial collapse. Today, the U.S. fiscal system is undergoing an irreversible disintegration, driven by globalization and institutional rigidity, which marks the decline of this great nation.

Second, America's once-stable ethnic fabric is collapsing or has collapsed.

The data suggests that America's previously stable demographic structure, which used to be predominantly white, has begun to fully disintegrate. In June 2016, the Wall Street Journal newspaper cited the results of the latest census and said that three-quarters of Americans over the age of 55 are white, and only 56 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are white, and even less than 50 percent of minors, and geographically, the non-Latino white population in 370 counties in 36 states and Washington, D.C., is less than half of the country's total population. These areas include large cities such as Fort Worth and Austin, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, Sacramento, California, and many others.

What is worse is that in the context of the poor economic situation of Latinos, blacks and other ethnic minorities in general, the intensifying "political equality" movement in the US public opinion circles has seriously aggravated the national consciousness of these poor groups. In fact, the biggest problem of these poor American minorities is economic poverty rather than political weakness, and mainstream public opinion in the United States simply emphasizes political equality, which will not improve the economic status of these minorities, but will lead them to blame the distortion of their poor economic situation as political injustice, which in turn will lead to political fanaticism and intensify ethnic self-identity.

Facts show that with the rise of the "political equality" movement of Latinos, blacks and other ethnic minorities in the United States after Obama took office, the national consciousness of all ethnic groups in the United States has been rapidly enhanced. To a certain extent, the political effect of the "political equality" movement in American society, which is divorced from economic reality, among poor minorities, is similar to the popularization of "Roman citizenship" in the empire forcibly promoted by the Roman Emperor Caracalla regardless of the differences in domestic reality, which stimulated the greed of the frontier ethnic groups of the empire for the wealth of Italy, triggered the division and turmoil of the empire, and finally planted the seeds of the decline of Rome.

The intensification of the trend of ethnic decomposition in American society actually means that once the United States declines, not only will there be no cycle of rise and fall in Chinese history, but it will more likely be similar to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the division of the Ottoman Empire, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Most importantly, the social consensus and ideological system of the United States is crumbling under the onslaught of globalization.

With the emigration of jobs caused by globalization and the impact of illegal immigration on the income of wage earners, the class and ethnic contradictions in American society are intensifying.

The global relocation of industries and the cheap labor of illegal immigrants are conducive to the high profits of the American capital groups, but they have seriously damaged the interests of the American working class, especially the white blue-collar class.

Taking the pharmaceutical industry as an example, in the United States, one R&D staff salary can recruit five in India, and there is no need to pay benefits. High profits have driven industries to move out, which has reduced jobs in home countries. Robert Scott, a staff member of the Economic Policy Institute, believes that from 2001 to 2011, at least 50,000 manufacturing factories in the United States moved to other countries, and more than 2.3 million jobs were lost overseas. At the same time, the influx of illegal immigrants has severely hit the price of the domestic labor market in the United States, greatly reducing the labor costs of American companies. Objectively speaking, in the process of the globalization of capital and human resources, the US capital circles have benefited greatly.

However, the working class in the United States (predominantly white) has suffered greatly from globalization, becoming an object of abandonment, and living conditions have deteriorated dramatically. In 2013, Princeton University published a report analyzing the mortality rate of the U.S. population from 1999 to 2013. The results show that the mortality rate of white Americans aged 45 to 54 has increased by 0.5% per year over the 14-year period, while the mortality rate of other ethnic groups has gradually decreased, and the Pew data in 2015 shows that the income of the predominantly white middle-class wage earners in the United States as a percentage of the nation's total income has decreased from 62% in 1971 to 43% in 2014.

In fact, in the process of global wealth redistribution, ideological rifts have emerged in all strata of American society that are difficult to bridge. The huge profits from globalization have made the American upper class more and more insistent on promoting the process, while the American working class, who have been abandoned in the process of globalization, has become increasingly resistant to globalization and has developed a strong sense of community (they are also Trump's main supporters). The contradictions caused by such interests are actually irreconcilable, and this is the fundamental reason why the contradictions in the US election are so fierce.

What is more serious is that, judging from the attitude of the American high society towards Trump and his supporters, it is clear that the mainstream elites of American society have underestimated the determination of those who have been abandoned in the process of globalization to resist, which undoubtedly lays a hidden danger to the stability of the American political system.

In this election, Trump undoubtedly saw part of the reality, and his controversial cry was not entirely sensational, and it was the key to his victory over some people's hearts, but the chronic diseases of the American empire cannot be cured by a rudimentary doctor like Trump (in fact, he is more likely to cause damage). For, the wealth of this great nation has long since withered, and the hearts of the people have long since fallen, and those who strive to govern will at best become Aetius of Rome, Enverpasha of the Ottomans, and Churchill of the British Empire, but they will never become the consuls Scipio, Sultan Murad, and Marlborough who have recreated the country. And Biden is more of a paster than a savior of the country's destiny.

There is no doubt that the great city on the hill is on its way to disintegration. The foreign admirers who were intoxicated by the beauty of her civilization were like the nobles of England who admired the Italian city-states on the eve of the fall of Rome, and the Korean scholars who looked at Beijing with awe at the dying moments of the Ming Empire.

However, no matter how great an empire is, there will eventually be a day of decline, and the ancients said that "its rise is also vigorous, and its death is also sudden!" From ancient times to the present, who can avoid it?