The GOP keeps worrying about poll numbers and the next election. Instead of standing on fiscally responsible ground and doing what is right, they continually acquiesce to the Democrats. Or, as we saw with Bush and the GOP controlled congress, they spend money just as poorly as Democrats.

Voters need a clear alternative to the Democrats. If the GOP doesn’t want to step up and take that role, then we’re destined for a new political party.

Don’t think you are being crowded out? Watch how economic growth is in the doldrums, yet the price of gas, oil and commodities is rising. That is the face of the beginnings of decline. You are being crowded out by the rising sea of billions of emerging world citizens whose purchasing power is rising and crowding out your purchasing power, because, in the first place they are crowding out the value of your work, which is becoming less and less exceptional by the day as you are been promised more comfort in mediocrity and more haircutting were you to succeed.

That is what decline is. A wretched slow descent. Appears slow on a day to day basis, it is precipitous on an intergenerational time scale. You, the American middle class, now commands a prosperity level 6x the world average. But growing at an average 2% in a world that is growing by 5% for the next 30 years, your children will only command 2.4x.

That is what decline is. And you will live to see it in your own lifetime. The world is moving too fast now to conveniently pass the decline down to the next generations.

The scenario of political dynamics in the US is playing exactly as it has in the many other European countries that once flourished and declined. Naive Americans, confirming their worldwide naïveté, are failing to see the striking resemblance and thus American voter-lemmings continue their march down the ever steepening slope of decline. Initially it is a pleasant walk, downhill, easy, but after a while the slope increases to the point where mere resistance is hard but turning around is even harder. Then you tumble, into decline and the dustbin of history. Others take the lead, and write the history.

Americans, by virtue of fiercely competing against each other in the first place (ie. relative absence of mandatory collectivism), have always won the international prosperity competition. They take that fact so much for granted that I’m not sure they are aware the competition exists, and what the stakes in losing it are. The American 99% are really the worldwide top 15%. But they seem to be doing their darndest towards descending into the true worldwide 50%.