I'm beginning to wonder if the U.S. is headed towards an economic collapse. There are a few things that point in this direction to me.

1) Shrinking value of the U.S. dollar abroad.

2) Increasing energy and gas prices. Expect a sharp rise in prices at the pump in November. Crude prices are soaring, but the costs haven't made their way to the consumer yet.

3) The trade deficit.

4) The budget deficit.

5) The loss of manufacturing jobs. What the fuck is a "service economy" anyway? How can a nation sustain itself if it doesn't make anything?

6) The loss of "service" jobs. Exhibits A & B. Loss of telephone service jobs like help desk functions overseas. Loss of computer programming positions to places overseas. If we are transitioning to a "service economy" and now many the services are being outsourced, what kind of economy can we have?

7) Soaring costs of healthcare and higher education.

8) The inability of local economies to respond to weather related issues. Every snow storm, every flood, every drought has become a national disaster.

9) The lack of development of infrastructure and energy sources. Suppose the President proposed creating a national superhighway infrastructure like the one our nation built between 1956 and 1975. Could we do it again? I'm not sure that we could.

10) Our increasing reliance on illegal immigration for certain types of work. This is the reason immigration is not that big an issue this year. On the Republican side, business relies on those immigrants for crop harvesting and other jobs that Americans will no longer do for the salaries we can afford to pay. On the Democratic side, they are actively courting the Hispanic vote.

I guess the thing that really hit me was the latest NASA plans. Our schedule now is to go back to the moon by 2020. From 1957, when our nation got Cold War space fever as a result of the Sputnik launch, it took us until 1969 to get to the moon. Now NASA is saying it is part of their plans to go back, but we won't get there for another 13 years - one year longer than it took us the first time half a century ago. Ever notice how wrong the science fiction writers were about this? They had us with permanent colonies on the moon a decade ago at the latest, and manned exploration of the solar system well under way by now. I thought it was bunk, but I'm sort of shocked that if we make an effort to return to the moon it will take us an additional year longer than it did the first time.

Terrorism and our occupation of Iraq are masking issues that the media focuses on now rather than big questions about our economy. These items satisfy our instinctive focus on narrative. Politically, we are already looking at a Presidential election that is over a year away. Why? Because this horse race between individuals who really will operate politically almost identically is more interesting that the numbers game of the economy. We also seem increasingly focused on celebrity news. At the local level, news has degraded into covering the latest traffic accident and murder case. We ought to have more interest in the economy but our instinctive attention focuses are distracting us.