Why Voting for Biden or Trump Will Destroy America

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The $31.4 trillion U.S. Government debt ceiling was surpassed ten months ago in January.

U.S. national debt surged by more than $500 billion in just the past 20 days to reach $33.5 trillion now, according to data provided by the Treasury Department last week.

On September 18th, the Treasury reported that the amount of money borrowed by the federal government to cover operating expenses stood at $33.04 trillion. It took Washington only three months to drive it from $32 trillion to the current level.

The debt ceiling, which was legally set at $31.4 trillion, was surpassed in January 2023.

The total output of the U.S. economy was only $25.46 trillion, meaning that the economy would have to grow by 33.5% to cover the national debt.

Russia’s RT News reported all of this on October 12th.

The reason for this financial deterioration of the U.S. — which deterioration everyone in the United States can see — is that 53% of the expenditures that the U.S. Congress vote for and which gets signed into law by the U.S. President go toward the U.S. military including veterans’ benefits, homeland security, nuclear weapons, CIA, DIA, weapons-purchases, and, of course, fund America’s 900 foreign military bases, etc, instead of to serving the needs of the American people.  Half of that 53% — 26% of that total — is going to the corporations that sell weapons etc. to the Pentagon. That’s where the money is and the enormouss profits are to be found in America.

The U.S. now spends $1.5 trillion dollars each year on its military, and that is half of the $3T which the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates the entire world spends on the military.

Either the United States will halt the imperialistic jag that it has been on ever since 25 July 1945, or else it surely will have an enormous crash, because things are already so bad here that even Jeff Bezos’s hyper-imperialistic rag the Washington Post headlined on October 3rd both “AN EPIDEMIC OF CHRONIC ILLNESS IS KILLING US TOO SOON” and reported that “The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive,” and it also headlined “The Post spent the past year examining U.S. life expectancy. Here’s what we found.” and reported that:

1 Chronic diseases are killing us.

2 Gaps between poor and wealthy communities are growing.

4 The seeds of this crisis are planted in childhood.

5 American [Republican Party] politic[al policie]s are proving toxic.

All of it was true. But America’s imperialism is bipartisan and is the root-cause of this and the rest of America’s decline; and the Democratic Party’s Obama and Biden have been possibly the worst of all on that score; and Jeff Bezos’s propaganda-sheet for him and the other Democratic Party billionaires is part of the problem, of misinforming the voters so that only billionaire-friendly politicians (i.e., neocons) can win seats in the Oval Office and in Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court. It is the billionaires and their neocons who control the U.S. Government and are destroying America — and the world. It is their fault — BOTH of the current American political Parties, both of which are rotten to the core and sell-outs to their billionaires.

America’s life-expectancy peaked in 2014 at 78.84 years. In 2021 it was 76.4 years: it declined 2.44 years during the prior 7 years. (Wikipedia instead shows on the basis of the World Bank’s data that it had declined 2.51 years to 76.33 years.)  The U.S. Government has not made public any new longevity figure since then. The U.S. Government now, on 12 October 2023, has online a press release that’s headlined “United States Life Tables, 2021”, and it’s dated oddly 7 November 2023, and says “Public Access Version Available on: November 10, 2023, 12:00 AM”. However, the figure for 2021 already had been calculated and published in December 2022 as being 76.3 years; so, perhaps they are re-calculating it. They haven’t yet calculated the figure from 2022. That’s when we’ll know whether the 7-year decline became an 8-year one or instead jumps up suddenly above 78.84 years. There is nothing on the horizon that gives reason to expect America’s life-expectancy ever again to reach 78.84 years, which already was near the bottom of the industrialized countries.

In 2014, the global average life-expectancy (shown by Wikipedia as being between the 109th and 110th ranked countries) was 71.88 years; and this became 71.33 years in 2023, for a global loss of 0.55 years during those 9 years, as compared to America’s loss of 2.44 or 2.51 years during those 9 years. So: America’s healthcare performance since 2014 is considerably worse than the world’s during that time.

However, various organizations calculate these data, and some of those organizations appear to be tampering with the data, and show different or inconsistent figures. For example: the World Bank showed 73 years as the global average for each of the 3 years throughlout 2017, 2018, and 2019, but on their graph showed a clear increase throughout that 3-year period (and then the graph there showed a steep decline to 71 in their most-recent year, 2021).

What seems to be fairly clear is that among at least large countries, life-expectancies peaked at 2019 (just before covid-19) and have declined since then — especially in U.S., Russia, and India. So, maybe those declines were at least partly due to that pandemic. The least-affected (or best-performing) large countries were China, South Korea, and Japan. Apparently, death-rates actually did increase as covid-19 struck. However, China and South Korea are standouts in having continued their life-span increases even after covid-19 hit.

The Health System Tracker site says:

We find life expectancy in the U.S. fell by 2.7 years from 2019 to 2021, whereas in peer countries’ life expectancies fell by an average of just 0.2 years in this period. COVID-19 has erased two decades of life expectancy growth in the U.S., whereas the average life expectancy for comparable countries has decreased only marginally, to 2018 levels.

The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries while it far outspends its peers on healthcare.

From 2020 to 2021, life expectancy continued to decline in the U.S. while rebounding in most comparable countries.

Life expectancy in the U.S. and peer countries generally increased from 1980-2019, but decreased in most countries in 2020 due to COVID-19. From 2020 to 2021, life expectancy at birth began to rebound in most comparable countries while it continued to decline in the U.S. The CDC estimates life expectancy at birth in the U.S. decreased to 76.1 years in 2021, down 2.7 years from 78.8 years in 2019 and down 0.9 years from 2020. The average life expectancy at birth among comparable countries was 82.4 years in 2021, down 0.2 years from 2019 and up 0.4 years from 2020.

America, which per-capita spends by far the most on healthcare, doesn’t have enough money to provide its population with good health-care, because 53% of the country’s discretionary governmental spending goes to its military, and half of that goes to weapons-makers such as Lockheed Martin, and because its Government places a far higher priority on its military than on improving the health of its population, who keep getting sicker and sicker — and because America, by means of its corruptness, wastes at least half of what it does spend on health care. And its population keeps re-electing the politicians who have done this to them; so, there’s no accountability — really none at all — for the political office-holders. Even ones who are very corrupt and/or who have harmful ideologies are routinely re-elected. The megadonors who fund the winning candidates have bought the government that they want, and they get to keep it. This is why life-spans are now getting shorter in America.

To vote for Biden or Trump will destroy America. If that’s to be the only choice, then the only choice will be to destroy America — and the world. Believing the lies of either Party can bring only destruction. And that’s the brute fact.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.