Lazun123 wrote:America rules the world. We are the dominate military power, economy, and influencential entity. So how dose it feel to be dominated by a bunch of "retards":)
Economy:Although we do dominate the wold in military spending and use of our military we haven't been in the top 10 in economy in a long time.
We're 20th right now in GDP per capita and standard of living. When adjusted so as to remove the top 1% of wage earners our average income falls below almost all of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea plus all the smaller states with tons of wealth (Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco etc...). We have greater wealth disparity than all of them.
More important than that we also have fallen behind most other modern economies in our ability to change income brackets from what we are born into. Currently you have a better chance of becoming wealthy in FRANCE if your parents were middle class or poor than you do in the United States. The American Dream is dead.
On top of all that our GDP is exaggerated due to 'financial services' dominating large sectors of our economy. If adjusted to include most other indicators such as production, agriculture (which we also dominate), trade in goods, energy and debt BUT NOT FINANCIAL SERVICES we fall into the list around 34th for adjusted GDP.
We still dominate in innovation and new technologies but Total foreign patents passed Total American patents in 2008 and the disparity has increased yearly since. We dominate in software and medical patents but things like renewable energies and battery science are now dominated by Europe and China. China, Japan and Germany now dominate us on Solar and Wind production and these are the techs of the future that will build better economies.
CULTURE:It's debatable if we still dominate the world in culture. Music, Movies and Television production is now more international. Americans are watching more international shows, music and movies than 20 years ago. Other indicators of "Culture" such as video games, tourism and language have also fallen in comparisons. Yes, English is still growing increasingly dominate internationally but more non-immigrant Americans now speak Spanish than ever before per capita and 20x more Americans speak Chinese since 1990.
Tourism to America is way down and up elsewhere. Europe passed us for tourism per capita after the Cold War.
Military:America absolutely dominates the world militarily. No one else is able to project power like the American military. We spend more than the next 11 countries combined on our military and are able to use it wherever and whenever we want. Unfortunately that usually means we do. There's a reason we can't afford a National Healthcare.
Most non-Americans don't really understand how integral the American Military is to our country and are stunned when they see it being trained in America. The military is ever present in America. Even simple things such as our VA system, Veteran Political Groups and Veteran of Foreign Wars community centers have no real comparison in most foreign countries. No other country has anything like the military culture of the United States and it can sometimes be disturbing both to us living here and those abroad.
The percent of members of the American Congress who were in the military peaked back in the 70's at nearly 75% but it's still huge today at 20% compared to other modern Democratic industrial states without mandatory military service. The fall off is of course due to the retirement of WWII veterans and those who served during the draft.