Where Are We?
[2025 ended as a year many would just as soon forget, unless the U.S. stock market was your single benchmark. As the backlog of critical needs was building, I followed a series of authors in search of course corrections. One chain of thought that received some traction came to be known as the Abundance Movement. Starting with a book titled Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I followed how other authors responded to the book, and what history and current events had to say relevant to the debate. The result is a series of eight essays that will be posted to Fifty Year Perspective weekly through January and February. Here the first part.]
Where are we? As a nation, is America becoming great, or are we in decline? Are we on the cusp of a tariff-powered burst of job creation and debt reduction? Are MAGAts picking away at the decaying democratic body politic? Is class division replacing political division? Are we capable of improving and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for economic growth?
Looking for answers among the daily news reports proves inadequate. The U.S. economy remains strong, if measured by record high stock prices. Federal Reserve monetary policy may be holding off inflation. Consumer spending was resilient for the holiday season. Technology firms are making huge investments in infrastructure, especially AI data centers.
But there are some recent employment trends that paint a different picture. Small businesses cut 107,000 jobs between April and September, in anticipation of decreasing revenue due to tariffs. The federal government expects to eliminate 300,000 jobs in 2025. In October 2025, total employment for the combined public and private sector recorded the highest number of monthly layoffs in 22 years.
Even if stock markets and the economy appear robust, not all families are benefiting. U.S. household debt hit a record $18.59 trillion in the third quarter of 2025. Delinquencies increased among low-to-middle-income households. Average home price increased nearly twice as much as median household income in the last 50 years, pricing many families out of the single-family housing market. Twelve percent of the US population relies on SNAP for food assistance. More than 87 percent of the country’s corporate equities and mutual fund shares are owned by the wealthiest ten percent of American households. The country that declared that all men are created equal has a GINI index ranking it more unequal than Canada, Australia and every country in Europe.
The wealthiest country tolerates inadequacies that it appears unwilling to tackle. The country’s infrastructure for transportation, electricity, parks, schools, dams, levees, and hazardous waste received a cumulative grade of D+ by civil engineers. Improvements in infrastructure are hampered by overregulation by governments, NIMBYism and individual rights lawsuits. K-12 public education is underfunded and teachers underpaid. One out of six U.S. teachers work second jobs. Other developed countries’ education systems are outperforming that of the United States. The U.S. performs worse in some common health metrics despite higher healthcare spending. U.S. leadership in renewable, cheaper energy production has been reprioritized behind investments in fossil fuels. Inadequate financing of government services produces annual budget deficits that continue to add to the current $37 trillion national debt. The U.S. lacks a coherent immigration policy, one that touches everything from global technology leadership to seasonal employment to humane treatment of refugees.
There is an emerging political movement called Abundance. It contends that many of today’s failings of government authority result from laws and regulations put in place to solve problems of the 1970s. Laws were enacted to prevent every conceivable consequence of any proposed action. Relieved of the constraints of regulatory obstacles, goals of affordable housing, improved healthcare and upgraded public infrastructure could become achievable.
Observers have questioned the wisdom of the Abundance movement – whether it is reasonable or even possible. Future essays will review the positions of several of those observers.