Republican presidential candidates often warn that America is declining, and that only they can stop its demise. Former President Donald Trump believes that the national decline halted during his term in office and will stop again when he is reelected.

But five unmistakable signs of American decline have been gathering momentum for decades, through both Republican and Democratic administrations. No president or party can solve these chronically intertwined, deep-rooted, systemic economic, political, societal and cultural problems. Officials can only manage the decline and mitigate the impact.

1. Uncontrollable U.S. Debt: The U.S. Debt Clock displays the inevitability of American decline — a “ticking time bomb” of data and financial evidence — especially the following three.

The U.S. government’s total unfunded liabilities — the combined amount of payments promised without funds to recipients of Social Security, Medicare, federal employee pensions, veterans' benefits and federal debt held by the public — stand at $212 trillion, and are rapidly increasing. For context, that number was just $122 trillion as recently as 2019 and is projected by the Debt Clock to reach $288.9 trillion by 2028.

That is an unimaginable amount of money — more than a quarter of a quadrillion dollars. When or if the government is forced to reduce payments, pensions or services to hold things together, or to default on its debt, the consequences will be brutal.

The second ticking bomb is the U.S. debt. At $34 trillion, it has increased more than six-fold from $5.6 trillion in 2000. Of that........

© The Hill