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Under Construction
Some basics about politics in the United States of America: The U.S. is not a democracy. It is a democratically elected representative republic. The "executive" founding fathers, those who were most involved with the writing of the U.S. government, wanted a government where the minorities were protected from the majorities. One of the basic ideas is that, among an educated populous, the vast majority will be basically correct most of the time about most general issues. However, when dealing with specific issues, people will most often have prejudices. An example would be that most people in the U.S. will say that people should have free speech and be able to live as they choose as long as they aren't hurting anyone else. Except for Those People, they're sick and a danger to anyone who knows what perverted things they are doing! Obviously. So the government is not supposed to pass laws unless it can be reasonably shown that not passing such a law would present a significant danger. And that was how federal law was (officially) handled until about the 1930's. A 1937 U.S. supreme court decision, which stated "[T]he existence of facts supporting the legislative judgment is to be presumed, for regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions is not to be pronounced unconstitutional unless in the light of the facts made known or generally assumed it is of such a character as to preclude the assumption that it rests upon some rational basis within the knowledge and experience of the legislators.", is generally considered the turning point in U.S. law. Of course this principal had been blatantly violated many times before this (laws specifically targeting various minority groups, including laws that expressly violated the US Constitution such as religious requirements to hold government offices), but during this time it became the official U.S. government policy. It is not a coincidence that after this time the number of U.S. laws enacted skyrocketed.California State Senator Don Rogers was (in)famous for voting against bills on the basis that there already were laws covering the issue, and neither the state or federal Constitutions gave the government authority for such regulations in the first place. The number of laws passed per year has increased dramatically and politicians have gone from publicly admitting that they don't read or even have an understanding of laws that they have voted on to admitting that they don't even read the laws they "sponsor" or have supposedly written.
The greatest problems with the USA can perhaps be summarized as Risk Avoidance. The basic idea is that items such as aspirin and automobiles would not, if invented today, be allowed on the market, or at the very least would be severely regulated. Instead of finding out the relative risks and benefits of a product, then making individual choices, demands are make that the government ban and/or heavily regulate any product or activity that is not absolutely "safe" (news flash! Nothing is completely safe!). The willing abdication of personal responsibility, along with the severe inhibitions to innovation, create an environment that will make it difficult for the USA to continue to be the world leader. If we add in bureaucracy (which is to a large degree the avoidance of risk by the distribution of responsibility through paperwork) and willful ignorance (a large factor of which is the "if I don't know about it, it can't hurt me/ I can't be expected to do anything about it" outlook), there are not too many other areas in which the USA is in any general decline.
"At last count, Congress Assembled contains two physicists, two chemists, two biologists, one geologist, 234 lawyers and an astronaut. This puts the lawyers within striking distance of an absolute majority in the 538-member Congress." - (Russell Seitz, "Congressional Math", Wall Street Journal, Nov. 11)(sub-only).
Now it is important to keep things in context and remember that the United States of America is, over all, the greatest and most powerful nation to ever exist. Most of the problems that ail the USA are problems that have existed (and been remedied) before. There are a large number of events that could cause people to stop accepting the comfortable status quo and there appears to be no immediate major issues (in a historical sense. Most current problems have been much worse in the past), so we still have time. The question is whether things will slide to a critical condition, or worse, be pushed there by some catastrophic event, before enough people become aware of the issues and do something positive about them.
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