The Opium War of 1840 is known to be a symbol of the decline of the Qing dynasty, but this decline actually began decades earlier.
Title: Is the U.S. Economy Really Beginning to Decline?Judging from how the lives of the common people were in the late Kang Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty was lax, the treasury was empty, and the people's livelihood withered, but after a short trough, the Qing Dynasty regained its peak in the middle of the Qianlong period, and its martial arts surpassed the previous Kang and Yong dynasties.
From Qianlong's later years to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, his national strength never returned to its previous heyday, both at home and abroad. In 1793, when the British Minister Macartney visited China, China chose to continue to sleep, and some people said at the time that the Qing Dynasty had declined, and now it seems that this person is sharp-eyed, and he is the first person in China to open his eyes to the world.
So, is the United States in real decline or fake in decline?If so, when did it begin?Here we must first set a standard for decline, so that we can make comparisons.
I tried to come up with a criterion, that is, how the life of the common people is doing, whether it is getting better and worse every year, or getting worse every year. The most controversial issue about this standard is probably why it is not scientific and technological progress;The second is why it's not GDP per capitaPerhaps there is another one, which is why it is not a global hegemon.
I would like to put these issues at a later stage and discuss them together with the question of how China can surpass the United States. According to this criterion, it is better not to use per capita income for comparison, but to use the indicator of median income, which is the data in the middle, where half of the people have a larger income and half of the population has a smaller income.
If the median income of a country is $10,000, half of the population earns more than $10,000 and the other half earn less than $10,000, which is a better indicator of the real income level of the majority than per capita income.
According to publicly available data, the median household income in the United States in 2008 was 5$030,000, or $6 in 2020$750,000, an increase of 1720,000 US dollars, with a growth rate of 34%, on the surface, this data is okay, much better than Japan and the European Union.
Looking down, in the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, the nominal GDP of the United States increased by 42%, and the real GDP increased by 18%, the so-called real GDP is the GDP after deducting inflation, and the difference between the two is 24%, which can be simply regarded as the inflation rate.
This means 5030,000 US dollars, due to the 24% price increase factor, in 2020, with 6$240,000 is equivalent, and over a 12-year period, the median real household income has increased by only 0$510,000, with a growth rate of 657%, the average annual growth is even more pitiful.
Looking at the 12-year federal debt balance of the United States, from 10 in 200802 trillion dollars, 27 by 202078 trillion dollars, an increase of 17$76 trillion, an average annual increase of 1$48 trillion.
In accordance with the United States 1300 million households, which means that if the money is divided equally, each American family can get 1$10,000, while real household income growth is much lower than that.
Therefore, we have reason to believe that there is a big deficit in the US economy, and this deficit should be no less than that of Japan and the European Union, and even because there are more pots and jars on their backs, the actual situation is even more serious.
The consequences of this deficit are almost irreversible, the chances of a turnaround are minimal, and the fact that the United States is going downhill is almost confirmed. As for the deeper reasons, we'll dive into ** later.