[Newsbot]

Title: UK service firms defy Brexit
Category: Business
Posted By: N_Fiddledog
Date: 2016-10-01 00:10:13

[N_Fiddledog]

So they were wrong about Brexit being the end of the British economy.

Could the same types be wrong about Trump being the end of America?

[raydan]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

Could the same types be wrong about Trump being the end of America?

Well they'll be wrong if he doesn't win.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

So they were wrong about Brexit being the end of the British economy.

Could the same types be wrong about Trump being the end of America?

Trump is a wildcard, and that makes a huge difference in comparing the two.
Besides, the end of America has already begun. It's been in decline since it got tangled up in Vietnam. Not blaming the Vietnam War, just using it as a rough time reference.

[Canadian_Mind]

Why you suggest Vietnam? Figured America was good to go until the 90s.

[bootlegga]

I would say the decline started shortly after 9/11, which I believe future historians may compare to the Sack of Rome in 476 AD. Alternately, it's decline began after its ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In the 90s, the USA was at its zenith, having bankrupted the Soviets, squashed Iraq with ease, and co-opted China to really adopt its economic reforms (pseudo-capitalism).

[andyt]

Remember the surplus conundrum and peace benefit. Projections during the Clinton regime were there would be so much money coming to the govt and military savings that they wouldn't know how to spend it all. Then the Shrubster came in...

But Vietnam was the beginning. Johnson agreeing to escalate the war in return for support for his great society plant. Just couldn't afford both.

[Thanos]

I don't think that a grand event or single bad policy can be the source of the decline. If anything's gutted the United States and led the metastasizing of radical politics it was the industrial decline of the 1970's, followed by Reaganomics where the government went from being a lazy cop with minimal oversight over the banks and instead became an active partner of the wealthy in stealing everything they could from the middle and working classes. That was when the really bad things began to happen, like mass outsourcing, shuttering entire domestic industries (e.g. steel, textiles, etc) in favour of foreign imports, turning student loans into a for-profit business, legalizing crooked mortgages, CEO's making hundreds of times more salary per year than their employees, and probably a dozen other symptoms that when grouped together basically constitute a no-quarter-given economic war by the wealthy on everyone else that isn't one of them.

I always thought the main victims of Nazism were the Germans themselves, and not just in terms of death count and physical destruction done to Germany by the war but also in terms of spiritual damage done to their souls. Same with the Russians and communism. And same too with Americans and their wild-eyed embrace of capitalism, where they've become the most-damaged people from that which they erroneously celebrate as part of their freedom. If there's ever been a country where believing too strongly and for far too long in childish myths has ended up wrecking them as a unified nation then it has to be today's United States.