Chapter 21
In This Chapter:
● Riding forward into the past with Ronald Reagan
● Ending the Cold War once and for all
● Overcoming controversy with Bill Clinton
● Fighting terror with George W. Bush
● Finding the future of freedom
The U.S. took a turn to the right under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan helped end the Cold War with a little help from the tapped out Communists. He also instituted a tax shift that let the rich get richer and the middle class get a little poorer.
Reagan talked against government but spent so much money on the military that by the end of his term he had tripled the debt of the country. But by energetically following the policy of containment of Communism started under Democratic President Truman after World War II and followed by every president, Republican or Democrat, since that time, Reagan got the honor of presiding over the end of the Cold War. The presidents who came after him got the dubious honor of facing a rising national debt.
As the U.S. sailed toward the 21st century, it seemed for a while that the entire world just wanted to live free and easy like the Americans they saw in movies.
When the 9/11 buildings came crashing to the ground, the U.S. discovered that the America-is-cool sentiment wasn’t exactly unanimous. Some people hated American lifestyle, attitude, and foreign policy so much they were ready to explode themselves to get even. These people included both home-grown bombers and foreign militants.
Although the AP U.S. History exam has few questions on modern times, an understanding of how themes and topics apply to recent issues helps show good analysis in essay writing.
Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics
All the hippy-dippy demonstrating, impeachment, moralizing, and rabbit attacks of the 1970s had left Americans longing for a simpler life. They found their leader in Ronald Reagan, who handily defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election.
Reagan believed in small government and lower taxes. He was a champion of the antis: Reagan was anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-feminism, and especially anti-special programs to help minorities. He was especially supported by right-wing religious people who called
themselves the Moral Majority (1980) and believed that their Christianity was right and that anyone who believed differently was a tool of the devil.
In a strange way, Reagan’s appeal was a reverse copy of FDR’s crusade for the so-called forgotten man; Ronald Reagan defended hardworking regular people that modern society seemed to have forgotten. The only difference was that Reagan defended their feelings, and FDR defended their income. Reagan’s tax breaks ended up helping the rich far more than the poor.
Returning to the good old days with the neocons
Ronald Reagan had the support of thinkers who called themselves new conservatives or neoconservatives (1985). This small group of writers, known as neocons for short, believed in the counterintuitive proposition that if Reagan cut taxes, tax income to the government would actually rise because people would have more money to spend and the economy would grow. It didn’t work for Reagan; he managed to pass a large tax decrease, but the economy just sputtered along during much of his administration.
Tax policy alone isn’t the key to economic growth. High-tax Europe and Japan grew rapidly in the late 20th century. The low-tax United States slipped into the Great Depression in the 1920s. How much money people have isn’t the issue — how they spend it controls the
Supporting Military buildup
Neocons also believed that aggressive military intervention would increase America’s power in the world. They supported a large military buildup (difficult to do with lower tax revenues) and confrontation with Communists around the world.
Military power seemed to work best when it was restrained; America’s potential for destruction helped force the U.S.S.R. to send Communism into a timely grave. When Reagan actually unleashed U.S. military might, the results were often unfortunate, like the U.S. intervention in Lebanon that ended with Marines being bombed in their barracks, or successful but overblown, like the large American invasion of the tiny island of Grenada.
Turning back the clock on government regulation
As far as domestic government policy goes, Reagan was against it, saying that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Although he didn’t succeed in making the federal government much smaller, he did what he could to turn back the clock on government regulations.
Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior eased environmental regulations on polluting industries and favored opening wilderness areas and shorelines for oil and gas leases. When air-traffic controllers went on strike, Reagan fired them.
His economic policies were called Reaganomics (1982) or supply-side economics; less government was supposed to mean more growth in the economy and, almost magically, more tax revenue. Tax cuts under Reaganomics mostly succeeded in making more money for the wealthy. The economy actually grew at a slower rate during the Reagan administration than the post-World War II average. Reaganomics simply didn’t work when it came to creating growth or increasing government revenue.
To the credit of Reagan’s administration, the interest rate policy of the economists he appointed helped bring inflation, which had soared under Nixon and Carter, back under control. Reagan also won applause by appointing the first woman to the Supreme Court.
Question: What was the most noticeable effect of Reaganomics?
Answer: It got more money for rich people.
Running up the trade deficit
During the Reagan administration, the U.S. went heavily into debt and ran an international trade deficit of billions of dollars a year. Neither of these trends has stopped since the Reagan period; addiction to foreign oil and imported consumer products has made the U.S. spend far more overseas than it takes in from exports.
This discrepancy is called the balance of payments (1986) problem. The U.S., which in the first half of the 20th century was the master of international business, became the world’s largest debtor nation beginning in the 1980s.
Checkmating Communism
Reagan took an aggressive stance against Communism, which he called “the evil empire.” He built up American military might and announced his intention to deploy a Strategic Defense Initiative (1983), better known as Star Wars, to shoot down Soviet missiles before they could get to the United States.
This plan apparently impressed the Soviets more than it did U.S. scientists; Star Wars was cited as one of the reasons the Soviet Union gave up the military race with the United States and began to dismantle their Communist economic system. The U.S. military was never able to deploy a large-scale missile defense system, but the bluff worked.
The Cold War reaches the freezing point
The Soviets clamped down on a freedom movement called Solidarity (1981) in the government of Poland (which they controlled). The U.S. responded with tough words and an economic embargo.
When the U.S.S.R. shot down a Korean passenger plane that had strayed into Soviet airspace in 1983, Reagan called it an act of barbarism. By the end of 1983, all arms-control negotiations had broken down. The Soviet Union almost launched nuclear weapons against the U.S. when they briefly mistook a Western military exercise for a nuclear attack. They also boycotted the 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. The Cold War was reaching the freezing point.
The U.S. flexes its military muscles
In the 1980s, Iran and Iraq were fighting a war that the United States didn’t mind watching; America had little love for the leaders of either country. The U.S. supplied arms to Iraq in the early 1980s as payback against Iran for holding American embassy people hostage up to the first hour of the Reagan administration. This arms deal was one reason that Iran may have been behind the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon.
In 1983, Reagan sent troops into Lebanon to try to calm endless Middle East conflicts. More than 200 Marines died when an Arab extremist suicide bomber blew up their barracks. U.S. troops, who never had a clear mission to begin with, withdrew a few months later.
In the same month, Reagan sent a heavily armed invasion party to the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to wipe out some Communist troublemakers. They succeeded in restoring democratic government in a move that would have made Teddy Roosevelt proud.
Reagan cruised to reelection against a Democratic ticket that included, for the first time in history, a woman as vice presidential nominee.
Mikhail Gorbechev
The Soviet Union had a new leader: Mikhail Gorbachev promised glasnost and perestroika (1986), which mean openness and restructuring. The Soviets began to shrink their military spending and concentrate on long-overdue civilian improvements.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood in front of the divisive Berlin Wall and said, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace . . . open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Late in the year, the two leaders signed the INF Treaty (1987) banning all intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
Iran-Contra and other problems
In an illegal and morally challenged international trick, Reagan administration officials later agreed to sell arms to the desperate Iranians in return for secret payments that these officials channeled to anti-Communist rebel forces in Nicaragua that Congress had officially rejected American aid to.
In making their secret deal, the Reagan administration officials weren’t only helping a regime that had kidnapped Americans; they were also acting against the expressed direction of Congress. This kind of action is grounds on which Congress can impeach a president. Reagan pleaded ignorance of the plot; his secretary of defense was charged with criminal behavior. An investigation found that Reagan knew or should have known about the bad deal.
Other holes appeared in the ethical shell of the administration elected with the support of the Moral Majority. Environmental Protection Agency officials resigned in disgrace after they misused staff and gave special deals to polluters. Three of Reagan’s cabinet members, including the attorney general, were investigated for lying and stealing; Reagan’s personal White House aide was convicted of perjury.
His last days in office were clouded by a stock market crash, but he remained sunny and optimistic. When he died in the early 21st century, his burial site was inscribed with his own words: “I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.”
One Term of George H.W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush came as close as you can to inheriting the presidency. His grandpa was a presidential advisor to Hoover, and his dad was a U.S. Senator. He himself already had a White House office as vice president to Ronald Reagan.
Family legacies in U.S. politics
In a large and diverse nation, some families just seem to pop up again and again in leadership roles. George H.W. Bush wasn't the first president to see his son take the office. That would be the father and son team of second President John Adams and sixth President John Quincy Adams.
William Henry Harrison, ninth president, was the grandfather of 23rd President Benjamin Harrison.
The Kennedy dynasty includes (but isn't limited to) 35th President John, his ambassador father Joseph, and his senator brothers Bobby and Ted, not to mention his niece Maria Shriver (who's married to California's best-built governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Family legacies extend beyond bloodlines, too. Husband-and-wife team Bill and Hillary Clinton have held the offices of president, governor, and senator between them.
Even though Bush had once called Reaganomics “voodoo economics,” he was happy enough being Reagan’s vice president and was easily elected president in 1988. Although he was a former representative to China and head of the CIA, Bush stood by without even proposing economic sanctions in 1989 when Chinese tanks crushed democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Democracy had more luck in Europe.
The fall of the Soviet Union
In 1989, the former Soviet puppet governments fell, as did the Berlin Wall. Eastern European nations were now free to govern themselves. What had been the Soviet Union split into the Commonwealth of Independent States, the largest of which was Russia. A hero for helping the Communist empire open toward freedom, Mikhail Gorbachev fought off a coup attempt from party hardliners and then retired, leaving behind a small world of independent nations struggling toward democracy.
Bush signed the START II Treaty (1993) with Russia, pledging both nations to reduce their long-range nuclear weapons by two-thirds. The U.S. military scaled back with the end of the Cold War.
In additional good news, Nelson Mandela gained freedom from prison and became president of a democratic interracial South Africa. Free elections in Nicaragua ousted the leftist government there without the necessity of the Iran-Contra plotting of the Reagan administration. The U.S. tossed a drug-lord dictator of Panama out by force.
Operation Desert Storm
Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, invaded the neighboring oil-rich country of Kuwait in 1990. Working through the United Nations, President Bush skillfully put together a coalition of the United States and 28 other nations to kick Saddam out. Although the U.S. contributed more than half a million troops, the other nations added 250,000 more on their own.
Operation Desert Storm tore through opposition forces like a hurricane; U.S. and coalition forces rolled over Hussein’s army in four days. Kuwait was free; the only problem was that Saddam Hussein was left in power in his capital of Baghdad.
Legislation under the elder Bush
On the domestic front, Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990), which prohibited discrimination against the one in seven people who have some form of physical or mental handicap. (Bush managed to appoint a conservative African American to the Supreme Court.)
Bush grudgingly accepted some improvements in environmental water usage and civil rights, but the only controversial legislation he proposed was the tax increase that cost him the presidency.
Campaigning in 1988, Bush had dramatically said, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Faced with huge budget deficits, he was forced to go back on his word and raise taxes in 1990. The Democrats wouldn’t let people forget that mistake.
Modern Democracy with Bill Clinton
The Democrats hadn’t elected a two-term president since World War II, but they had a charming centrist in Arkansan William Jefferson Clinton. Bill Clinton defeated Bush’s reelection bid by emphasizing the paycheck of the average American, which had actually grown smaller during the Bush administration. A sign in Clinton’s headquarters said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Clinton ran a positive campaign based on pro-growth, strong defense, and anti-crime platforms that almost sounded like the Republicans. He promised to overhaul the creaky welfare and health care systems. He admitted (as indirectly as possible) to “causing pain” in his marriage and smoking marijuana. He was the perfect candidate for the baby boom generation, which made up most of the U.S. voting population.
The new rainbow America
While Clinton won the presidency, the nation was undergoing a radical change in elected officials. The new House of Representatives included 1 American Indian, 7 Asian Americans, 19 Hispanic Americans, and 39 African Americans; 48 of the representatives were women. That was more women and minorities than had ever been elected before, and the numbers continued to grow into the 21st century.
At the beginning of the Clinton administration, the nation wasn’t willing to accept just how broad the rainbow was becoming; a bid by Clinton to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces was rejected for a don’t-ask-don’t-tell halfway measure.
Clinton appointed his wife Hillary to come up with a national health plan. Industries making big money off a piecemeal non-system that left one out of six Americans with no insurance managed to convince people that Hillary’s reform proposals were scary. Health care reform took a back seat until the 21st century.
Although Republicans often accuse Democrats of being tax-and-spend crazies, Clinton managed to turn the huge budget deficits run up by 12 years of Republican administrations into modest budget surpluses. He passed anti-crime bills that also contained some gun control provisions.
Battling extremism
Clinton was just in time with the anti-crime — in 1993 Muslim extremists took their first shot at the World Trade Center in New York with a bomb that killed six people. A couple of years later, home-grown terrorists blew up 168 people along with the federal building in Oklahoma City. Shootouts with extremists and in schools shocked the nation. Although the hundreds of deaths involved in these events were better than the thousands that happen in a war, domestic violence showed that Americans weren’t all happy campers.
Contract with America
Especially unhappy were the members of the old Moral Majority, who saw the country being swept by the devil’s work of abortion, drugs, welfare, and religious apathy. They joined a Republican counterattack called the Contract with America (1994), which promised welfare and budget reform. The Republicans swept to victory, controlling both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.
Reforming Welfare
Now Bill Clinton got to see what it had felt like to be a president with an opposing Congress, something that Republican presidents had put up with for years. Clinton survived by working with the Republicans; after all, he was a conservative Democrat. Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Bill (1996). Over the wails of old-school Democrats, the bill forced welfare recipients to work when they could and restricted benefits for new immigrants. Despite angry opposition from social conservatives and Republicans, Clinton had most of the country with him when he breezed to reelection in 1996.
Politics of the possible
Clinton was unable to expand health care, but he added loans for college students and modest tax breaks for poor people and raised the minimum wage. His greatest political advantage was a robust U.S. economy that enjoyed the longest period of sustained growth in American history. Clinton supported international trade with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1993) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (1994); these agreements made exporting American manufacturing jobs easier but brought down the cost of goods in the United States to bargain levels. Clinton fought against tobacco and guns, both of which caused a lot of deaths.
In international affairs, Clinton intervened without getting America stuck in any big wars. He failed to offer effective help when millions of people died in tribal violence in Africa, but he sent in troops to stabilize Haiti and to stop years of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton took some missile shots at terrorists in Afghanistan and Sudan, but limited U.S. involvement in the Middle East to the ever-elusive goal of encouraging peace talks between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors.
Dogged by controversy
Like most presidents, Clinton’s administration wasn’t without controversy. He staunchly denied having an affair with a 20-something White House intern, but DNA evidence later forced him to backpedal. The Republican-controlled Congress brought Clinton up on impeachment charges for lying to a grand jury about his involvement, invoking that extreme Constitutional mechanism for only the second time in U.S. history.
They clearly took it more seriously than the American people; the Democrats actually gained seats in Congress during the run-up to the Congressional trial. Impeachment requires a two-thirds vote to pass; Clinton’s charges couldn’t even get a majority vote. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, said that ongoing investigations of the Clintons during most of their time in the White House were a right-wing tactic to stall social legislation. After years of public investigation, the Clintons were never convicted of anything, and Clinton left office with the highest approval ratings of any post-World War II president.
Clinton held off Republican attacks on most social programs and modestly improved the lives of regular people by protecting wilderness land, hiring new teachers, and increasing opportunities for higher education through grants and loans. The economy offered nearly full employment, and real income for working people crept up after decades of inflation-adjusted doldrums. As he was leaving office, the issue of global warming was heating up, and Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, promised to do something about it if only he could get elected president.
George W. Bush, Terrorism, and War
As the world faces the threats of climate change, it’s tempting to think what would have happened if an environmentalist had won the most votes in the 2000 presidential election. Oh, wait a minute; Al Gore did win the most votes. He just didn’t win the election because of a fluke in the way the Constitution structures the presidential election: indirect election through an electoral college.
Due to the state-by-state, winner-takes-all Electoral College, a candidate who narrowly wins more states can win with a minority of the votes. You can’t get any narrower than George W. Bush’s election in Florida: He won by 500 votes out of 5 million. Voting along party lines, the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recounts, and Bush was declared the winner of the election.
Ironically enough, under the recount rules Gore initially requested, Bush would have won, and under the rules Bush requested, Gore would have won. The election was that close. In a further irony, Ralph Nader’s Green Party bid had siphoned off enough votes to deny environmentalist Gore a clear victory.
Texas governor to U.S. President
George Bush grew up around the White House while his dad was Reagan’s vice president and then a one-term president on his own. Young Bush had been a popular governor of Texas and cultivated a close relationship with Moral Majority Christians based on his own story of being born again to true religion after a wild youth.
Without trying to turn the clock back on New Deal social reforms, Bush campaigned on social issues like being against abortion and in favor of business growth. His faith-based social services distributed billions of dollars through Christian religious organizations that were supposed to provide social help, not religious preaching, to stay clear of the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of a government-supported religion.
Facing increasing economic problems
If the key to being president is really, as Clinton felt, about “the economy, stupid,” then the Bush administration could be judged on its economic numbers. The gross domestic product (value of the output of goods and services produced within the nation’s borders) grew at an average annual rate considerably slower than the average for the post-World War II period. Unemployment stayed low. Budget deficits rose rapidly, a change from the budget surplus in the last year of the Clinton administration. Inflation-adjusted median household income was almost flat, and the nation’s poverty rate increased slightly.
The national debt went up by trillions of dollars during Bush’s presidency, adding more than a third to the burden future generations would have to pay off. With the low cost of imported manufactured goods, living was easy for most Americans, but the bulk of income gains went to people earning more than $250,000 a year.
Health care and children: Hot-button issues
President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), which improved educational standards but failed to provide much funding for schools. He vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which would have expanded health care for poor children, because he said he was against socialized medicine.
He may not have supported children’s health, but Bush took a turn toward government health care for older people when he signed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, which added prescription drug coverage to Medicare (though people pay extra for it).
Bush also vetoed a bill that would have allowed for stem cell research to find cures for disease; some religious conservatives opposed the controversial research.
Climate change and global warming
Upon arriving in office in 2001, Bush withdrew United States support for the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change trying to control global warming; as a major world polluter, the U.S. was the only leading country not to sign.
Bush administration officials censored the reports of government officials on global warming, and Bush said he didn’t take action on the problem because of “debate over whether it’s man-made or naturally caused.”
Bush did set aside the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a national monument, creating the largest marine reserve in the world.
Hurricane Katrina
One of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina, struck early in Bush’s second term. The storm destroyed much of the city of New Orleans and the surrounding north-central Gulf Coast of the United States. Many thought Bush was slow in getting aid to the region; his director of emergency management eventually resigned. To his credit, Bush took full responsibility for the problems.
9/11 and living in a terrorist World
After his minority election, Bush wasn’t very popular, but the country came together to back him after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon in Washington. As he stood in the smoking ruins of the towers and promised justice and protection, over 90 percent of the American people said they approved of his actions.
After the 9/11 attacks, in which hijacked planes destroyed the twin 110-story World Trade Center buildings in New York and damaged the Pentagon in Washington, Bush condemned Osama bin Laden and his organization Al Qaeda (2001) (which means “the base”). Bush announced that the United States would attack other countries (even though they weren’t directly threatening the U.S.) if those countries harbored terrorists.
President Bush gave the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating, a warning to “hand over the terrorists, or . . . share in their fate.” Bush announced a global War on Terrorism, and after the Afghan Taliban regime wasn’t forthcoming with Osama bin Laden, he ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime.
In 2003, he also invaded Iraq, whose connection to 9/11 was vague at best. Unlike his father’s 1991 Iraq war, this time only a few thousand outside troops joined the largely American effort as the U.S. Army pushed into Iraq. The U.S. military was bogged down for years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. With chances for a clear victory dwindling, the American public got tired of the news of bombs and casualties.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed an executive order authorizing wiretaps without a court order. The American Bar Association said that move was illegal, and after years of wrangling, Bush agreed to abide by the law. Although President Bush felt he was standing tough in the cause of freedom, his popularity sunk to historic lows.
At the end of his administration — as conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on with no end in sight — Bush’s approval rating had sunk to just 24 percent, the lowest since Nixon resigned in disgrace 35 years earlier.
Adjusting to the 21st Century
As the 21st century rolled in, the old school world was clearly gone for good. The United States was the senior modern democratic government in the world and the newest source of social innovation. In a sense, the U.S. was the U.N.; all the nations of the world were represented in its population.
If the world could ever find a way to live together, it would have to start in the United States of America. The U.S. moved closer to fulfilling the democratic dream of its founders as minorities and women were increasingly freer to express themselves and leadership looked more like the pluralistic society it represented.
Business changes with society
Business showed how society had changed. At the time of the Revolution in the 1700s, most people lived on farms and produced what they needed in isolation, except for a Sunday trip to church and maybe a little salt, sugar, and coffee from the country store. In the 1800s, canals and railroads stitched the states together. Buying or selling over distances as great as several hundred miles suddenly became possible. People got to know a wider world and formed associations that eventually changed women’s rights, slavery, and government.
Large stores like Sears started out sending orders through the mail. With the growth of cities in the 1900s, stores built big buildings. As airplanes and telephones brought the world together, international trade made products cheaper, and world travel allowed people to appreciate both what was different and what was comfortably human about foreign lands.
In the early 2000s, the Internet (2000) brought general store sites like Amazon and the ability to trade pictures and text instantly anywhere in the world. Second-generation sites like Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook allowed direct links to people, products, and ideas that the searcher may not have known even existed before. To the democracy of politics was added the democracy of culture and communication.
Because people could download any music for free (legally or otherwise), the economics of the recording industry changed dramatically. Movies had to go to immediate release before someone could copy them and pass them around. People longing to communicate churned out even more writing, music, and videos. Computer games allowed people to play with folks they had never met. MP3 players let everybody travel to her own soundtrack.
A continuing trend: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer
The United States wasn’t a democracy of economics; America had in fact one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in the developed world. Moving toward the second decade of the 21st century, people who made more than $120,000 a year saw their share of the national income grow from 15 to 20 percent.
Part of this discrepancy was due to tax breaks passed by a Congress well funded by business contributions, and part of it was the natural rewards of educated workers in high tech industries. The virtual absence of well-paid union jobs for people with less education didn’t help, either. Although the rich got richer, the middle class and most of the poor still had enough money to get by.
Breaking family ties
Family ties broke down, and people established new families of friends. One out of two marriages ended in divorce, and more and more people lived alone or in single parent households. Chat sites replaced front porches, and surfing the Internet largely replaced newspaper-reading.
Living longer, but at a price
More people exercised and fewer people smoked. After waddling into the 21st century due to the yummy presence of cheap fast food everywhere, Americans started to get a grip on their waistlines.
Most elderly people lived comfortably into advanced age with Social Security and Medicare. Because Social Security was a pay-as-you-go system, the number of young workers available to pay taxes that supported retirees was critical. In the early 21st century, there were seven
young workers for every retiree; by the year 2050 there may be only four. Because people lived longer, the need for new sources of funding threatened old-age benefits. Social Security already cost more than regular taxes for most working people.
Question: As more Americans became older, what system became threatened?
Answer: The Social Security system needed an overhaul to maintain benefits.
Shifting minority demographics
Latinos replaced African Americans as the second most populous group in the United States. More and more places, like the state of California, were majority minority: no single group made up more than 50 percent of the population.
The U.S. took in more immigrants than ever before — almost a million a year. These new legal residents kept the United States growing and full of new ideas. Illegal immigration was a real problem for social service providers; at least 10 million undocumented people from other countries flooded the educational and health care systems. Illegal immigrants also paid taxes and seldom collected long-term benefits. Estimates indicated that one of every hundred dollars paid into the Social Security system came from an illegal immigrant who would never be eligible to collect benefits.
In the early 21st century, Asian Americans families made 20 percent more money than the average white household. Two and a half million American Indians and others who were part American Indian made up as big a population as was present when Columbus arrived. American Indian income went up as tribes operated gambling casinos in 29 states and took in billions of dollars a year in revenue.
More Americans in prison
Americans in the land of the free kept more of their citizens in prison than any other advanced society. The number of people in prison went up from less than 400,000 in 1980 to more than 2 million in the early 21st century. This increase was part of a great U.S. experiment to see if locking up perpetrators actually held down crime. It seemed to work; major crime was down in the U.S. in the early 21st century.
Venturing farther into the 21st Century
Escaping urban problems, most Americans lived in the suburbs. With air conditioning, more and more people lived comfortably in the South’s hot climates. Both of these trends increased energy demands and made coping with global warming that much more challenging.
Americans were used to being distrusted for their affluence and feared for their easygoing cultural influence around the world. They were often seen by those who didn’t like them as soft, yet Americans had stood up to frontier wars, militarism, Nazism, Communism, discrimination, and terrorism. They still welcomed the world. For better or for worse, the U.S. was more than just its past; the United States of America was the future.