Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990? It sometimes feels that way

[marmar]

Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990? It sometimes feels that way
America's symptoms of decline are everywhere — and history tells us what happens if we don't change course

By JACKSON DIIANI
PUBLISHED JANUARY 21, 2024 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) Question: Who owns the parking meters in Chicago?

Answer: Morgan Stanley and the city of Abu Dhabi. In 2008, in order to offset a budget crisis, the city council leased the parking meter system to a company called Chicago Parking Meters LLC, owned by Morgan Stanley and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Rates in most areas quadrupled.

....(snip)....

The U.S. is currently the only country in the developed world where life expectancy is declining. This is partly due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the trend actually began a few years earlier. From 2014 to 2017, life expectancy fell for three consecutive years; this hadn't happened in the U.S. since 1918, and is virtually unheard-of in modern societies not facing war or disease. According to data from the Center for Disease Control, U.S. life expectancy is now at its lowest since 1996. COVID erased two full decades of life-expectancy growth in the U.S, whereas average life expectancy in peer countries decreased only marginally, to about the level of 2018.

....(snip)....

The U.S. is suffering from an inability to provide basic, reliable social services. Although the Biden administration has ramped up infrastructure spending, the American Society of Civil Engineers still grades U.S. infrastructure at C-minus, its second lowest ranking. The U.S. exhibits higher wealth inequality than almost any other developed country, and is the only major developed country that does not guarantee health care to all citizens.

In other words, these symptoms of decline did not come out of nowhere. We have been following this trajectory for decades. America now ranks as a “developing nation” on a number of international indexes. Our condition is not terminal, but it is moving in the wrong direction. The overall health of our society is backsliding, and it seems conceivable that we could be approaching a major upheaval on the scale of the collapse of communism in the 1990s. ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/01/21/is-america-like-the-soviet-union-in-1990-it-sometimes-feels-that-way/

[Voltaire2]

1. It was the post-collapse Russian Federation that had the most serious declines.

The soviet era system had excellent healthcare and education systems. All of that was destroyed post collapse. The steepest decline post WWII was from 1991 - 2005, coinciding with the collapse of the USSR and it's replacement by the Russian Federation.

[appalachiablue]

2. K/R