LOL, thank you frequent flyer. My question also. As to Ryan's "Civics Crap", and Jim Hudson's whining about the 'poor downtrodden' this is the only country in the world set up this way and it has worked well for over 200 years,
Well, there was that Civil War thing, so no, it hasn't worked well for that long. Things nearly fell apart in the 1930s, too; my Dad remembers the fascists marching in the streets, and the country was a tinderkeg. (Thank you to FDR for changing the system enough to stabilize it; this required bullying the Supreme Court.)
making the US the most affluent and powerful country in the world.
Most powerful is debatable. There are no hard numbers which can define "most powerful". I say China is the most powerful country in the world, and there's no real way to prove me wrong.
We're *certainly* not the most affluent.
By mean GDP per capita we make #6:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
By the Human Development Index, we make #3:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
By median household income, we are #10, though some argue we're as high as #7:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income#OECD_Statistics
By industrial production, we're #2 (trailing China by a huge amount), and by agricultural production we're #3; most of this is just due to sheer size, though. We lead the world in service sector workers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition
What's more damning, however, is that in life expectancy at birth, we're #35.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
The "Where to be born" index makes us #17:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
The US is not #1 at anything except
(1) percentage of population in prison (most in world!)
(2) number of people in prison (most in world!)
(3) amount of money spent on military (more than every other country put together, and we still lose every war we get involved in!)
If it seems broke at times, perhaps that was the intent of the design. A dysfunctional government is the best government. Good luck changing it.
Oh, it'll change. No society tolerates a severely dysfunctional government for more than a few decades. The real question is what it's going to change to: it's quite possible for it to be replaced with something even more dysfunctional, which is something worth avoiding. (People won't tolerate that either, but then you get into this cycle of chaos, like Mexico did for 100 years.) We should rather attempt to improve it.
After World War II, US experts on governance advised various countries (first Japan and Germany, and later the countries decolonized by European powers in the 1950s and 1960s) on how to design their new Constitutions. One of the things they uniformly said was "DON'T COPY US!" The Bill of Rights was held up as a good example, but structurally, countries were uniformly advised to adopt Westminster-style parliamentary systems with proportional representation. There's a *reason for this*.
The US is the longest surviving "Presidential system" democracy; they usually collapse into civil war (which we did once so far). Westminster/parliamentary systems have a substantially better stability record.
The Senate was a mess from the beginning. Senators were supposed to represent the state governments, but because they were appointed by *bicameral* state legislatures (another bad idea), whenever the state legislature was split between the parties, the Senate seats were left vacant. Everyone was fed up with that, so it was replaced with direct election of Senators in the 1910s. The problem with that is that now they don't represent the state governments any more -- the Senate is just like the House except severely malapportioned, with 40 Senators representing 10% of the population (and quite likely elected by a mere 6%).
I can't really blame the Founding Fathers because *they didn't know any better* when they wrote the Constitution. We do, however, know better now. US experts designed dozens of better constitutions in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and dozens of countries are using those constitutions.
