America has a lot of problems. It needs to invest far more in education and health care so that everyone gets access to decent quality levels of both. It needs to improve its social safety net so that we reduce the numbers of homeless and the level of food insecurity. And it needs to treat its undocumented immigrants and prison population far more humanely.
But when creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance talk of America’s decline, they are not calling for the improvement of any of those things. What they are describing is a largely fictional set of problems designed to make their supporters think that the country is on the verge of collapse when it is manifestly not.
Kevin Drum looks at eleven complaints they make and compares it with macro-economic markers of the economy and says that the country is nowhere close to being in decline and is in fact doing quite well. What creepy Trump and weird Vance are describing is based on (is anyone surprised?) lies. Drum sums up:
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