Originally Posted by jayeff

Your kind of "patriotism" damages this country more than any America bashing foreigner could ever do.

Thanks to people with your mindset, it's embedded in the American pysche that the US is #1. We don't want to hear any other message, so it is repeated ad nauseam by the media and no politician without the desire to commit political suicide can say different. Except we aren't number one in anything much except the size and variety of our armory, as consumers and as debtors.

We are now ranked 49th in world literacy and 28th in mathematical literacy with the result that US businesses are forced to spend $30 billion a year on remedial education. We rank 37th in overall health-care standards and 54th in terms of the fairness of our health care (the only other developed country which has no national health care program is South Africa), but we spend more on health per head than any other nation on earth. Among developed nations, only Mexico has a worse rate of child poverty. Women are 70% more likely to die in childbirth here than in Europe and even Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate. Only 50 of the 140 top-ranked Fortune companies are American (61 are European and all but 1 of the 50 "best" companies - according to [i]Global Finance[i] - are European); 14 of the top 20 banks are European; European companies are the biggest in chemicals, food and consumer products, and food and drug retailing. European and Japanese companies dominate engineering and construction.

We now borrow $2billion a DAY to stay afloat and 40% of our debt is held by China, Taiwan, Japan and S Korea. Our housing market would likely collapse if the Chinese didn't support low mortage rates so that people can keep buying its products. We lost 1 million jobs last year: 1.3 million to China alone over the last decade. We now import more food than we export. Last year Brazil passed us as the world's biggest beef exporter (they already lead in chickens, orange juice, sugar, coffee and tobacco) and within 10 years is likely to pass us as the overall biggest food exporter.

And on and on...

The tragedy is that we probably could still be #1 (assuming that matters) except that until you acknowledge there is a problem, you cannot begin to fix it.