We could also hope for the best and prepare for the best. Suicidal though that may be, it would seem to be the strategy under which most people labor. The hope is that it's their grandchildren who will be bled by their fiduciary chicanery, or better still, that pennies will rain from heaven.

Also worth considering: cosmic justice does in fact not exist; the world economy, as it is presently configured, could not tolerate the loss of the US and consequently will not allow it to happen, thus the efforts of other countries to prop up our currency.

I think that the US is in the middle of a painful transition from being the world's industrial leader to being the world's knowledge production leader. This will be a very unpleasant transition for those who planned their lives around an industrial world and now find themselves in a sea of computing technology. Oh well. The people who weaved things by hand fared ill when mechanized looms arrived on the scene, and if the job you presently perform can be performed by either an accounting program or robotics, then you are in for a world of hurt. Evolution takes no prisoners in the natural world, and at best it puts prisoners in extermination camps in the economic world. So it goes. Adapt or die. If America does not adopt such a hard-nosed strategy, then some other nation will, and will consequently exploit it to America's disadvantage.

The health care system is whack. The US spends more money on health care than any other country on the world, but somehow manages to see less in the way of total services. This is because there are enormous inefficiencies regarding the way the system is configured. We spend an enormous amount of money on the act of passing the buck, and thus when the rubber meets the road, or the physician meets the patient, much of the health care dollars have already been burned on outrageous administration costs. However, that being said, I am adamantly against state run health care. Monopolies are a bad thing, whether they are in the public or private sector. If things become corrupt within an organization, as they inevitably will, and there are no other players on the field, there is no competitive pressure exerted to correct the deformities. As a good first step, I think we should decouple employers and health care payers. People should be able to buy reasonably priced health care without it being tied to their job. Our present system is an anachronistic carry-over from the government fixing wages during WWII and employers finding ways to hack around the limitations of the system to compete for employees.

Social Security, as run by the government, is just a bad idea. It was a bad idea when it was instituted, and now we're trapped under its weight. It would be incredibly cruel to make people who have paid into it for their whole lives go without benefits now, and it is incredibly cruel to make young people pay into it now without any hope of ever seeing return. The simple matter of fact is that when you add everything up, there is no free lunch, and seeing as the initial recipients of the system were given such a lunch, it's likely that someone is going to end up paying for lunch and going hungry, subsidizing someone else's lunch and getting none of their own. The only way you can avoid this is to bleed rich people who don't need social security payments to pay for those who do.

A simplified tax code would be a huge boon for the economy. At 7.5 million words, the US tax code is out of control. There's no reason a good tax code could not be fully described on a few sheets of paper at a reasonable font size. As it stands, all of this bloat serves to favor corporations with a lot of pull who can get laws written specifically for them, rich people who can afford tax lawyers and accountants, and the tax lawyers and accountants who cash in on the tragedy. The US tax code should be burned to the ground and re-written from scratch.

The US military is in a bit of a pickle... On the one hand, it wants to be able to fight asymmetric warfare against terrorists. This means having a light and nimble force that can reach any corner of the globe within hours by air transport, instead of juggernaut-style forces that can roll over anything but have to be shipped via boat and take weeks to arrive. On the other hand, the US needs lots of conventional forces for two reasons. Firstly, if you're going to address the roots of terrorism, that means nation building, and nation building needs lots of boots on the ground. Grunts patrolling the streets of hostile regions aren't much helped by precision guided ordnance. They need lots of fellow grunts to spread the work, they need really good armor on their Humvees to deal with the people who want to kill them, and they need language skills to deal with the people who don't want to kill them so that they don't humiliate them, causing them to transition to the other team. Second, the US needs large conventional forces to deal with the rising threat of China. Simply put, China is building a huge navy, and that absolutely has to be countered in some way or other. If China has an armada of boats, the US needs an armada of boats. The real problem here is that the US has two conflicting goals, both of which are very expensive, and a ham-strung budget at home making every expenditure very painful.

Energy management is going to become an increasingly intractable problem. Not only are the present supplies already troublesome given their geographical location, but China and India are rapidly developing an insatiable appetite for energy. Unless the US wants to find itself in a bloody and protracted war over the world's energy reserves, it needs to find a way to attain energy independence, and it needs to do it quickly. I don't have a good feel for what the time line on this ought to be, but I would hazard a guess that things are going to be really bad if we haven't tackled the majority of this problem by 2020.

Perhaps the biggest problem in my mind that you have neglected to mention is that of education. As someone who has been through a lot of education in the American system, something that I find striking is that a lot of people don't seem to harbor a sincere and mature devotion to learning. They want to get their piece of paper, get out into the work force to make mad bling bling by tapping into that piece of paper, and they don't much care about possessing a tangible store of knowledge. Increasingly, American schools are becoming paper mills. It's a lucrative industry, and it's unsustainable because it's a fraud. There is far too much focus on airy credentials from accredited universities, and an alarming amount of focus on arbitrary metrics and the consequent "teaching to the test" in grade school. The result is a bunch of freshly minted college graduates with an entitlement syndrome, no idea of how what they have done in school might be applied to the work force in a meaningful way, and an utter disdain for the pursuit of knowledge.

In the end, a sense of entitlement is the kiss of death. It's a dog eat dog world. You'd better be a big and crafty dog, or you're on the menu.