America: What We've Become, Where We're Headed?

First, America, you are the unadulterated, sad, money-spending warmonger of the world, beyond question or doubt. It's who you--we--are. Face it.

Your people--us, we here in the homeland--think of you and ourselves as peaceful people and peace lovers yet we outspend all other countries in the world, and by obscene measures and quantities.

This we have known for some time but still, we Americans are proud and certainly don't want to think of ourselves as the world's warmonger but there you are.

Who has started the large predominance of wars in the last 5 decades?

We know the answer.

Now, news of where we are in terms of employment and so, wealth and/or possible wealth and an equally possible sign of a lack of wealth.

This from The New York Times this past Sunday:

The Idled Young Americans

From it, this rather startling statistic:

"...the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest."

Yikes.

Then there's this:

"The United States, for example, has lost its once-large lead in producing college graduates, and education remains the most successful jobs strategy in a globalized, technology-heavy economy. It is no accident that the most educated places in the country, like Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and Austin, Tex., have high employment rates while the least educated, including many in the South and inland California, have low ones. The official unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-old college graduates remains just 3.3 percent."

Fortunately, the article isn't totally full of gloom and doom for us. There are things we could do:

"Beyond education, the nation has also been less aggressive than some others in using counseling and retraining to help the jobless find work. To take one small example, a recent study in France by the renowned M.I.T. economist Esther Duflo and four colleagues found that placement programs for unemployed workers helped not only the workers but the economy too. The counseled workers were more likely to find work, and they did not simply take jobs from other candidates. Overall employment rose more quickly in the regions with job counseling. 

Other research notes that the United States has expanded parental leave and part-time work less than other countries — and, perhaps relatedly, employment rates among women here have slipped."

So we could do some things. We could help one another. We could, say, have a Congress pass a jobs bill instead of 34 repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare").  That would be something.

We could have that government sponsored counseling of our students and young people and/or grant parental leave for employees.

But then we'd all be Socialists, wouldn't we?

And we certainly can't have that.

Even if it would lead to success.