What is the single biggest problem with America today?

[SteyrAUG]

Racism.

Used either as a reason to hate, kill or feel entitled. Racism today is as bad as it ever was in the 60s. We need to remove "race" from just about everything associated with government and have ACTUAL equality instead. Race should play no more significance in a persons life than their hair color. And as Rachel has shown, you can change it when you want to.

Supposedly that has been the goal for what? 60 years?

[Turnkey11]

Over-regulation. A rule book should be just that, one book; not a library of code, regulations, and laws.

[interfan]

Not just an American problem, but Keynesian triumph over reason.

If you want to see a root cause of many of the other problems listed, look no further. Morality is also compromised when one no longer has to bear the consequences of not living a moral life.

Take a little marxism, mix it with political correctness, dress it with a generally useless generation of incompetents in power, then place it between two slabs of Keynesian regulation/tax/overspending/entitlements/shell-game money printing fantasyland monetary and fiscal policy and you have a perfect shit sandwich.

[SomeOtherGuy]

#1, systemic corruption. I'm not talking about simple bribe-taking or anything that's even technically illegal. I'm talking about the changes to various systems that result in inherently self-serving and corrupt motivations, which result in corrupt behavior. The current state of campaign finance would be an ideal example, but this issue exists across virtually everything in government and large portions of the private sector, including Wall Street and health service billing in particular.

#2, the sheer size of the country, in terms of population. There is a size at which management becomes impractical, democracy becomes a farce and everything tends to go towards an empire and/or dictatorship. I think we've passed that size threshold. There are no larger countries that operate well (China, India), nor any near-peer-size countries that operate well (Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh). The most populous country that seems to operate with some semblance of real democracy is Canada, at a little over one-tenth our population and far less racial and cultural diversity. The best functioning democracy in the world seems to be Iceland, which has literally one-one thousandth of our population (0.1%).

[MountainRaven]

Ignorance. Willful ignorance.

People keep talking about how they want to have national discussions about gun control, race, gender inequality, income inequality, the environment, human migration, &c., &c., &c. But no one wants to expend the effort to uncover the causes and find solutions and have a rational discussion on the grounds of what science shows and where our ideals point.

No, we get people talking past each other, oblivious to the fact that they are drowning in their own emotions - and trying to drown everybody else with them.

Instead of interest in solutions based in science and an understanding of the human animal, people are more interested in political, fiscal, moral, philosophical, rhetorical masturbation. People are more interested in clinging to any tiny shred of evidence that supports their own pre-conceived notions of how the universe should work rather than trying to see the universe as it does work and seriously considering the perspectives and points of view of those who disagree - and honoring the fact that we're all human beings and we all want the best for everyone, we all want people to be happy, we just disagree on what road to take.

Too many people would rather die ignorant than live enlightened.

ETA: And I'm not just talking about willful ignorance with regards to facts and scientific understanding of a problem and its potential solutions. I also mean the utter refusal of people to deal with each other as the rational/emotional animals they are, instead of writing off their philosophies and ideals as racism, a moral defect of character, or mental illness.

[TehLlama]

Proud ignorance.

Fjallhrafn absolutely nailed it with the last part, more so than my initial thought did. Being unwilling and incapable of civilized discourse takes away any viable means of correcting so many other issues that it ends up being the biggest aggregate driver of stupid stuff.

[jpmuscle]

I'm pretty sure proud ignorance is the same as willful stupidity lol.

[Honu]

i bet if you asked a lefty they would say global warming and the confederate flag but will be something besides the flag in a few days

[Belloc]

"Humankind cannot bear too much reality."
-T.S. Eliot

The biggest problem is the denial that there actually exists objective truth and reality. Or as philosopher Peter Kreeft states it:

The issue of moral relativism is merely the single most important issue of our age, for no society in all of human history has ever survived without rejecting the philosophy that I am about to refute. There has never been a society of relativists. Therefore, our society will do one of three things: either disprove one of the most universally established laws of all history; or repent of its relativism and survive; or persist in its relativism and perish.

http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/05_...nscription.htm

5 batshit crazy militant lunaic leftists on the Supreme Court just declared (again) that reality is whatever they say it is. If they say that homosexual sodomy is no different than the intimacy between a man and his wife, then it is so.

The banks and the government believed that they could provide hundreds of billions in loans to people regardless of their credit worthiness or current income, and everything would turn out just fine forever and ever.

Bush and Obama believed that sound foreign policy in the Middle East was to invade and drone strike the entire region to pieces, overthrow governments, and then classify islamic militant nutjobs as "moderate freedom fighters", train, fund and heavily arm them, and then unleash them in the most unstable part of the world, and everything would come up roses and daffodils.

The Catholic Bishops believed that secretly moving homosexual pederast priests from parish to parish would not eventually blow up in their faces. Yeah, that sure worked out well for them, not to mention thousands of underage children. Perhaps they should read Ann Coulter a bit more.

Despite the growing media consensus that Catholicism causes sodomy, an alternative view -- adopted by the Boy Scouts -- is that sodomites cause sodomy. (Assume all the usual disclaimers here about most gay men not molesting boys, most Muslims being peaceful, and so on.)
It is a fact that the vast majority of the abuser priests -- more than 90 percent -- are accused of molesting teen-age boys. Indeed, the overwhelmingly homosexual nature of the abuse prompted The New York Times to engage in its classic "Where's Waldo" reporting style, in which the sex of the victims is studiedly hidden amid a torrent of genderless words, such as the "teen-ager," the "former student," the "victim" and the "accuser."

http://townhall.com/columnists/annco...dopt/page/full

Sadly however Miss Coulter is going to have to revisit her article as now the Boy Scouts have decided to play make-believe and allow grown homosexual males to take young boys out into the woods.

Hell, just look at what is in my sig on this forum. At least one member here actually posted that animal "rights" activists are right to call hunting for food "murder", meaning that they are also right to call hunters "murderers".

That is the denial of reality, the "hey, let's all live in make-believe land", to which I am referring.

To continue.

Student debt has skyrocketed past $1 trillion, and it's not slowing down.
Some 60% of Americans spend more (about 103% respectively) than they take home.
Black households without fathers is sill over 70%.
White households without fathers is heading in that direction.
The national debt will blast past $20 trillion in just a few short years.
The ability of anyone to stop the inundation of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of illegals, the overwhelming majority of whom will always vote for more and more government money and programs taking care of them as much as possible, simply does not exist.
The military industrial complex that exists today when compared to what existed at the time when Eisenhower first utter that phrase, is rather like comparing Mike Tyson in his prime, to Pee Wee Herman when he was 4.
The mass surveillance of the NSA makes the East German Stasi look like Maxwell Smart on his shoe phone in the "cone of silence".


And on, and on, and on. The belief that any of this is sustainable is simply living in make-believe.
And of course the very real problem with all of this is that reality never allows us to mock and deny it for too long.
And the more and longer we deny reality, the more brutal and painful it is going to be when reality finally says "ahem".
And if there is one thing I am absolutely sure of in this world, it is that that "ahem" is headed right for us.

[Leaveammoforme]

Moved away from God.

All the proof you need is all the people that would contest that statement.

The symbol of our nation was colored as a rainbow. How our nation can mock Gods promise and be surprised at the direction our nation is headed is beyond me.

Step outside tomorrow and pause. Take it all in. The chirping birds, sky, trees, grass, barking dog a few houses down and whatever else you notice. Observe the harmony of everything working together. Remind yourself that it all is just a giant cosmic accident.

I suggest instead that you drop to your knees.