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Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

The US has been talking about the "Japan [central bank] Model" as a model of success for much longer than two years.

This meme first got really big in central-banking circles after the 2008 crash. Japan has been following this model for 35-40 years of managed-decline. The US has been toying with the same model for more like 10-15 years than 2-3 suggested above.

The US so far has managed its decline better, but not for nothing has "abundance agenda" become a meme lately even on the left -- as more and more people sense that managing the decline is the goal of current policy and they don't actually want to decline.

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The US has a healthy immigration system that brings in a consistent stream of workers and tax payers to support all the old people about to clog social assistance channels for decades. That's the strong trap that Japan has been stuck in for decades, and the one that'll start befalling China in a decade or so. It'll be interesting to see if Japan can escape the population deflation or if this is a constant shrinking population from here on out until it's untenable to continue as-is.

Ponzi schemes are good at kicking the can down the road but when they eventually collapse, they're orders of magnitude worse than they would have been if the core problem the scheme was implemented to address was just addressed when it first became a problem.

The fact remains that the US is in a far better position to deal with aging demographics than the majority of Western countries. Immagration policy needs to be adjusted as soon as possible as to not squander this.

Immigration isn't a ponzi scheme. It's a reasonable way to prevent a precipitous collapse in the ratio of workers to retirees as birth rates decreased.

Healthy immigration isn’t going to last much longer if the cons get back into power in 2023-2024, as seems likely at this point. Closing the borders will be a fantastic way to curry favor with the MAGA base, and the cons will have no excuse not to do it with Democrats completely out of power in every part of the government.

I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I have friends and family in the UK and traveled there monthly for years, so not zero context: and for a country that went from the largest empire ever to a minor great power at best in like 50 years, it seems like a pretty attractive place to live all things considered. It’s got problems but not like 10x worse than any other developed nation.

Do you happen to know how they managed that decline without worse consequences?

Managing decline is not a plan for survival. No matter what you think of Trump, this was one of his primary policy issues, and is the basis for the "Make America Great Again" slogan.

The creedo has a more specific and probably incorrect message: " we are broken, we need to be fixed. (Implied) I'll fix things". It's easy to attract conservative minded people as a rally cry to your cause when you reach for a nostalgic rhetoric about "the good ol' days" fallacy. Much divergent from the often left leaning "we can build a better future" which should probably also be considered a fallacy.

Back on topic, I don't think the electioneering slogan had any actual policy significance.

Managing decline is not a plan for survival.

And revanchism is? What Trump was trying to make happen "again" wasn't all that great the first time, except for those at the very top.

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