Illustration by Joe Magee for TIME 
 
 Poor U.S. of A., forever in decline. the arrival of public theaters in Boston circa 1790 caused Samuel Adams to despair for the cause of liberty in the face of such debauchery. "Alas!" he wrote. "Will men never be free!" Charles Lindbergh fretted, "It seems improbable that we could win a war in Europe." Long before baseball, hand-wringing was the national pastime. We've never been virtuous enough, civilized enough, smart enough or resolute enough. 
 
 I was born into a country reeling from Sputnik, which revealed to the whole world that Americans are as dumb as rocks. John F. Kennedy had just been elected President, in part by bemoaning the "missile gap" between the mighty Soviet arsenal and our paltry few bottle rockets. "The United States no longer carries the same image of a vital society on the move with its brightest days ahead," Kennedy said in his final debate with Richard M. Nixon. That's the same Nixon who declared eight years later, "We are worse off in every area of the world tonight than we were when President Eisenhower left office." Hard to believe we could sink further, but we did, as the nightmare of Vietnam segued into the nightmare of Watergate, while the Japanese exposed the insufficiency of American enterprise. As I stumbled off to college, President Jimmy Carter was warning us about "a crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." Thanks to our horrible schools, we were  according to the title of a major 1983 report  "A Nation at Risk." Then our family values went down the toilet. (See the Recession of 1958.) 
 
 You'd think America would be as washed up by now as the Captain and Tennille. So how come we're so much stronger than we were 50 years ago? Somehow, in the 235 years since we got started, Americans have weathered Boston theaters and Soviet science prodigies, violent lyrics and sex out of wedlock. We've survived a Civil War, two world wars and a Great Depression, not to mention immigrant hordes, alcohol, Freemasons and the "vast wasteland" of network television. We've dodged the population bomb, the coming ice age, acid rain and the domino effect. America is to nations what Roberto Clemente was to right fielders. The Pirates legend fretted endlessly about how poorly he felt and how sick he was  while vigorously spraying hits and vacuuming fly balls. 
 
 So don't reach for the defibrillator paddles or the rosary beads quite yet. 
 
 Overblown Symptoms 
 
 These days, the doctors diagnosing American decline tend to focus on two types of disease. Some worry about deteriorating "social capital"  inadequate education, a demoralized workforce, dysfunctional politics. Others focus on the physical fitness of our economic edifice: the scale of investment, the level of debt, the fractures in the infrastructure. If you collect enough symptoms, you can make a strong-sounding case that the country is indeed quite sick. But fallen trees don't prove the forest is dying. 
 
 And some of the most cited symptoms are overblown. Take the much discussed problem of income inequality. A very small number of superwealthy people are pocketing nearly all the growth in our national income. That sounds dire for a nation founded on the ideal of equality. It isn't, though, for a couple of reasons. First, a significant part of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Changes to the tax code since the 1980s have created strong incentives for owners of private businesses and certain partnerships to report their business earnings as personal income. This didn't necessarily change the amount of money in their pockets; it just meant that money is recorded in a different column of Uncle Sam's ledger. This expansion of so-called Subchapter S corporations and LLCs inflated the tax returns of the very rich  primarily the top 0.5% of all taxpayers. If the tax laws are changed again, money will shift again. Count on that. 
 
 Read "How to Restore the American Dream." 
 
 See pictures of hard times in Las Vegas. ||||| I am an American, not by accident of birth but by choice. I voted with my feet and became an American because I love this country and think it is exceptional. But when I look at the world today and the strong winds of technological change and global competition, it makes me nervous. Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that while these forces gather strength, Americans seem unable to grasp the magnitude of the challenges that face us. Despite the hyped talk of China's rise, most Americans operate on the assumption that the U.S. is still No. 1. 
 
 But is it? Yes, the U.S. remains the world's largest economy, and we have the largest military by far, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate. But these are snapshots of where we are right now. The decisions that created today's growth  decisions about education, infrastructure and the like  were made decades ago. What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. Look at some underlying measures today, and you will wonder about the future. (Watch TIME's video "Why Cities Are Key to American Success in the 21st Century.") 
 
 The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we're 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they're not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries. And, of course, we have by far the largest amount of debt in the world. 
 
 The Rise of the Rest 
 
 Many of these changes have taken place not because of America's missteps but because other countries are now playing the same game we are  and playing to win. There is a familiar refrain offered when these concerns are raised: "We heard all this in the 1980s. Japan was going to dominate the globe. It didn't happen, and America ended up back on top." It's a fair point as far as it goes. Japan did not manage to become the world's richest country  though for three decades it had the second largest economy and even now has the third largest. It is also a relatively small country. To become the largest economy in the world, it would have to have a per capita GDP twice that of the U.S. China would need to have an average income only one-fourth that of the U.S. to develop an economy that would surpass ours. (See Americans who are facing long-term unemployment.) 
 
 But this misses the broader point. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, who has just written a book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, puts things in historical context: "For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps  competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization." 
 
 To this historical challenge from nations that have figured out how the West won, add a technological revolution. It is now possible to produce more goods and services with fewer and fewer people, to shift work almost anywhere in the world and to do all this at warp speed. That is the world the U.S. now faces. Yet the country seems unready for the kind of radical adaptation it needs. The changes we are currently debating amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. (Comment on this story.) 
 
 Sure, the political system seems to be engaged in big debates about the budget, pensions and the nation's future. But this is mostly a sideshow. The battles in state capitals over public-employee pensions are real  the states are required to balance their budgets  but the larger discussion in Washington is about everything except what's important. The debate between Democrats and Republicans on the budget excludes the largest drivers of the long-term deficit  Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare  to say nothing of the biggest nonentitlement costs, like the tax break for interest on mortgages. Only four months ago, the Simpson-Bowles commission presented a series of highly intelligent solutions to our fiscal problems, proposing $4 trillion in savings, mostly through cuts in programs but also through some tax increases. They have been forgotten by both parties, in particular the Republicans, whose leading budgetary spokesman, Paul Ryan, praises the commission in the abstract even though he voted against its recommendations. Democrats, for their part, became apoplectic about a proposal to raise the retirement age for Social Security by one year  in 2050. 
 
 Instead, Washington is likely to make across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending, where there is much less money and considerably less waste. President Obama's efforts to preserve and even increase resources for core programs appear to be failing in a Congress determined to demonstrate its clout. But reducing funds for things like education, scientific research, air-traffic control, NASA, infrastructure and alternative energy will not produce much in savings, and it will hurt the economy's long-term growth. It would happen at the very moment that countries from Germany to South Korea to China are making large investments in education, science, technology and infrastructure. We are cutting investments and subsidizing consumption  exactly the opposite of what are the main drivers of economic growth. 
 
 See "The End of Prosperity?" 
 
 See a graphic showing Amercia's decline.
– David von Drehle begs to differ with fellow Time writer Fareed Zakaria's gloomy view of America's future. These doomsayers have been around since the country was in diapers, and the modern ones love to "cherry-pick dismal statistics from here and there to create an overall image of decline," von Drehle writes in his rebuttal essay. "If you collect enough symptoms, you can make a strong-sounding case that the country is indeed quite sick. But fallen trees don't prove the forest is dying." He calls most of the commonly cited problems "overblown," including income inequality. That's more an "illusion" caused by changes in the tax code than anything else, he argues. Fixing the tax code will help, but not much because "the main force flattening income growth for most Americans" is the massive force of globalization. And "contrary to what you may hear, the US is doing pretty well at riding that whirlwind," he writes. "Wages may have stagnated, but the US hasn't. America's inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and workers have answered the sudden glut of cheap labor around the world by leading an astonishing revolution in productivity." So let the doomsayers do their thing. But with "further hard work and sacrifice (goaded by the spur of our relentless self-doubt) the US will do just fine in the world it has shaped." Full column here, or click for Zakaria's column here.