However, the US is not in a "death spiral".
We're taking the exact same road that the Roman empire did, and there's no sign we're slowing down.
The reality of imperial decline is hard to dispute, albeit with qualifications. There’s always a danger that short-term trends can be mistaken for historical inevitabilities. Paul Kennedy argued in
his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers that America was entering a period of long-term relative decline. He was prescient in many ways, predicting China’s rise and the Soviet Union’s decline, but premature in predicting the weakening of America, which enjoyed a quarter-century of unchallenged dominance; the relative decline has only just begun.
The American empire, which more mainstream scholars prefer to describe in softer terms as global hegemony or the liberal international order, has always rested on three pillars: economic strength, military might, and the soft power of cultural dominance.
Relative American decline in economic power is almost inevitable given the rising clout of nations like China and India. As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs
observed in 2012:
In 1980, the US share of world income (measured in purchasing power parity prices) was 24.6 per cent. In 2011, it was 19.1 per cent. The IMF projects that it will decline to 17.6 per cent as of 2016.
China, by contrast, was a mere 2.2 per cent of world income in 1980, rising to 14.4 per cent in 2011, and projected by the IMF to overtake the US by 2016, with 18 per cent.
https://newrepublic.com/article/147319/witnessing-fall-american-empire
Failure at the center has left the United States up for sale to the highest bidder.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/02/the-american-empire-is-the-sick-man-of-the-21st-century/
America’s decline relative to a rising China has sparked interest among academics about power shifts in the international order—whether they can happen peacefully and under what conditions; what precedents exist and what they tell us. Now comes an important book,
Twilight of the Titans, by Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. McDonald, who use quantitative analysis of power transitions to analyze the problem. What they find provides a warning to a rising China, and a road map for a declining United States to regain its standing.
The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison called the problem “
the Thucydides Trap,” in which the country in relative decline so fears the rise of a challenger that it chooses to go to war to prevent it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/how-bad-americas-decline-relative-china/576319/
More than 40 million Americans live below the poverty line, and its total debt stands at 78 percent of the GDP, the highest since the 1950s.
https://www.trtworld.com/mea/is-the-us-on-the-decline-24934
Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts
Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/