The Question:
With America’s 2013 Independence Day now over, what do you think about the future?
19% - The U.S. is, and will remain, the greatest nation in history.
67% - U.S. greatness is in peril, but there is still time to recover.
14% - The U.S. has had its day and is in an inevitable decline.
My Comments:
As Americans look back on the 237-year history of the United States since declaring independence from Britain in 1776, we can point to many peaks and valleys along the way.
Today there are many national issues being debated. And, emotions are high enough on certain issues that it is not uncommon to hear the existential question asked, “Are America’s best days behind us?”
We wanted to know what our small business audience thought about this, so in our online poll last week we asked: “With America’s 2013 Independence Day now over, what do you think about the future?” Here’s what we learned.
Almost one-in-five of our respondents were optimistic by choosing this option, “The U.S. is, and will remain, the greatest nation in history. A slightly smaller group offered the opposite prediction, “The U.S. has had its day and is in an inevitable decline.” But just over two-thirds of our sample seems to be pragmatic optimists by declaring, “U.S. greatness is in peril, but there is still time to recover.”
Paraphrasing a line in the 1949 movie, “The Third Man,” generations of strife in Italy produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance, while hundreds of years of brotherly love in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock. America is known for its brotherly love, but ours is more like the kind you find in most families: lots of love mixed with lots of fighting.
But there is one area that is the most troubling: Our increasing dependence upon government to solve our problems. This trend is eroding the very unique American alloy that was forged from characteristics like fierce independence, self-determination and individual responsibility, beginning in 1619 with the Mayflower Compact.
We can debate, disagree and even fight over certain issues, but there will be nothing to fight over if America devolves into socialism. We already know how that movie ends, because it has been playing out in front of us for a few years now in the European Union, and closer to home in cities like Detroit.
As of now, there are entities with resources to help these profligate governments. But as the U.S. national debt tops $17 trillion and deficit spending projected well into the future, we have to ask ourselves this question every time we spend money we don’t have on things that we refuse to fix, “Who’s going to bail out America?”
It’s not too soon to start asking that question.
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