Now let's see - What caused some of the other countries to go down hill?
Here's what Wikipedia said about Argentina, a country that was very rich in past times.
Beginning in the 1930s, however, the Argentine economy deteriorated notably.[3] The single most important factor in this decline has been political instability since 1930, when a military junta took power, ending seven decades of civilian constitutional government.[5] In macroeconomic terms, Argentina was one of the most stable and conservative countries until the Great Depression, after which it turned into one of the most unstable.[6] Despite this, up until 1962 the Argentine per capita GDP was higher than that of Austria, Italy, Japan and of its former colonial master, Spain.[7] Successive governments from the 1930s to the 1970s pursued a strategy of import substitution to achieve industrial self-sufficiency, but the government's encouragement of industrial growth diverted investment from agricultural production, which fell dramatically
Military Junta - Looks like something to watch out for. I guess if people do something like storm the capital, then we gotta watch out.
I'm thinking the US can get into bad trouble if you follow the wrong money path. US used to be a net exporter and not so much of an importer. Now it's flipped. I can't see doing that forever. The money is going out. Looks like they really bumped up the money supply last year too. Not to good to print more than you have or you end up like the Weimar Republic and we may have the equivalent of Zimbabwe's trillion dollar bill.
Some countries that never seem to have their act together are run by crooks, men with no honor. They say what they need to to be elected and then proceed to do very well for themselves. I guess not too much really changes for the voters. This actually sounds kind of familiar. Both parties really, but I'm thinking more Republican right now after the Georgia Senate runoff.
One of the things that has really helped America along is that education has been provided. People don't seem to think public education is so important any more. They make it really hard for people to go to school beyond high school. Education is an investment in the country's future. It's one where you need to keep investing or the results will no longer be there. People can't do productive stuff if they don't know how and have no opportunity to find out how.
Let's look at successful countries. Everybody seems to be working at some sort of productive activity. They don't waste their most important resource, their people. Here in the US there seems to be a different idea about this. However, they are happy to have you take your stuff and live in a car.
Seems like if the people were more healthy, they would be more productive too. Isn't the health care thing just common sense for good business? If it was really available to people, I'll bet we would have all sorts of productivity gains.
I don't really like the idea of living in an empire. Empires are all wound up about military stuff. They are more like Sparta than Athens. I think we should be encouraging innovation and production rather than the military thing. If these swords are beat into plowshares, we can raise food to sell. The brain power dedicated to making weapons of mass destruction can be devoted to making stuff that the people of the whole world can use. For example making safe small nuclear power plants to solve global warming. I think Russia and China would probably welcome it if we had some good stuff to sell that they could use.
Maybe if the empire ended and we really got into being a trading republic instead, we would be better off.