One day, historians shall say a post-World War 2, 1950s to early 1960s economic bump masked the long decline of the USA. This decline began to be obvious in the late 1960s and began to accelerate in the early 1990s, with last gasps that included the dot com bubble of the late 90s and residential reality bubble of the mid-2000s.
However, the real decline began in 1913, during the the Quiet Revolution of 1913, which overthrew the Founders' constitutional design. During the Quiet Revolution, popular representation of the House was frozen at a permanent 435, which has made it easy to capture Congressmen.
Also popular voting for Senators became law, which took away the impossibility to bribe thousands of states' legislators, who had chosen Senators, and made it easy to buy 51 out of 100 senators.
The revolutionaries of the Quiet Revolution of 1913 established the Federal Reserve System, eventually replacing a specie money system based on gold with a fiduciary money system based on checking account credits, paper centralized bank notes and token coins.
In the days of specie money, citizens could run on bankers when they could see that bankers were mishandling credit. These runs forced bankers to behave. With gold as everyday money, bankers were powerless and so were politicians.
Today, in the era of fiduciary money, citizens live at the mercy and behest of bankers. It's bankers who control the Federal Reserve system and who bailout themselves and the lesser bankers whenever they mishandle credit, as in the most recent residential reality bubble stoked by no-doc liar loans.
Also, it's bankers who order their Federal Reserve system to buy bonds sold by U.S. politicians. However, their Federal Reserve system doesn't have money. So to buy bonds, the hacks at the Federal Reserve conjure up checking account credits from nothing.
Doing so is a kind of counterfeiting. Doing so is why food prices go up and why gasoline prices go up. Doing so is why unionized government employees are vastly overpaid for the same job titles as those in the private sector.
Also in 1913, the Quiet Revolution revolutionaries instituted the income taxation system, which gave politicians the means to dole out political privilege through subsidy to financial backers and welfare to loyal voting blocs.
So now you know what happened to America, Americans.
