I appreciate Jim Kunstler's weekly essay's. The above essay speaks of the many negative economic factors that all add up to a grave situation for the US economy. Jim certainly has his own style of writing, his unique manner in conveying what he feels about things. I agree in most cases with his sentiments. He does make the occasional mistake of defining timeframes of the occurance of certain events to precisely, something he reckognizes as an area he needs to be more careful off. Time will show us how accurate, or not accurate, the musings of Mr Kunstler's will turn out to be. I know humanity will try to solve by whatever means the dire growing problems that we are on the cusp of. But mere " trying " does not gauruntee that affective and sensible solutions will be found to such problems as overpopulation, world wide resource and ecosystem degredation, energy depletion, water and food scarcity, economic meltdown due to greedy and corrupt officials and business leaders, etc, etc. I think we ( humanity ) has dug itself a very deep hole that will offer us many hardships in " trying " to get out of it, and I think its very likely that our qualities of life in this process will be altered, transforming our realities to lives of less and less abundance.