After a recent Pew Research Center survey was conducted in January 2019, it was discovered that a large number of Americans believe that the U.S. is in a serious decline and one which will only grow steadily worse over the next 30 years, with seven out of 10 Americans surveyed stating that the country is weakening significantly in many ways.
This decline is one which Americans believe affects them both politically and economically, according to Pew Social Trends , and while 56 percent of those who responded are guardedly optimistic about the future of the country, when citizens were asked about specific issues, this optimism was found to erode markedly.
As such, the majority of Americans who responded to the Pew Research Center survey stated that they believed that the country’s national debt would only grow worse over time and that an ever-widening gap between those with large amounts of money and those without would most likely continue to spiral out of control.
Americans further believe that health care costs will continue to go up while the economy shrinks and that both the environment and elderly citizens will suffer even more over the next 30 years.
While there has not been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11, the majority of Americans also feel that another similar attack is imminent over the next three decades and one which may be drastically worse than 9/11.
NEW: Looking to the Future, U.S. Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts https://t.co/okVfOqnBYu pic.twitter.com/C1A7Ra6ro2
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) March 21, 2019
Further, according to Pew Research.org , eight out of ten of those surveyed believe that there will be widespread job automation in 2050, which they don’t believe bodes well for their careers or for society in general. Because of this automation, 76 percent of American respondents feel that the gap between the rich and the poor will only continue to widen.
Those who responded to the Pew Research Center survey were also decidedly gloomy about the role of the federal government in their lives, and politicians, in particular, received a strong show of no-confidence, with eight out of 10 of those surveyed stating that they are personally worried about the future of Washington.
On the plus side, a large majority of Americans believe that by 2050 there will either be a Hispanic individual or a female in the White House serving as president, and both Republicans and Democrats share this point of view.
After analyzing the troubling results of the January survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, in which a majority of Americans expressed their feeling that the U.S. was in decline, Pew suggested that “partisan polarization” is not likely to change anytime soon.
