The impoverishment of America

Am I just imagining things, or is America sliding away from the “American Dream”?
It seems to me that we are gradually losing the things that we have been fighting over the past couple of centuries.  One thing that seems to be going away is the dream that if we work hard enough we can pick ourselves up by our boot straps.  That is clearly possible for some, but it seems to be impossible for larger and larger segments of our society.  What appears to be happening is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and that trend is accelerating.  I seem to have somehow or another fallen on the “getting better” side of the curve, but I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I have never expected the poor to get rich, but it seems like many are falling further and further into poverty – losing their ability to have reasonable homes, food, education and health care.  It has been going on for so long that I have lost faith that it will, or can, get better.
It also looks like the entire country is little by little becoming more and more impoverished.  The roads are decaying, the schools are falling apart, and levees are not kept up and maintained.  In general, much of our public infrastructure seems to be collapsing because of inadequate maintenance.  Luckily, we did a great job of building these things in the first place; otherwise they would be decaying at a far faster rate.  I am noticing more and more things being put off or left undone.  For example, a couple of years ago when a car went off of the freeway and through the fence, the fence would be repaired in a couple of days.  I am now watching holes through the fences that have been there for more than six months, and the numbers of them keep growing because of new accidents.  Obviously, there is not enough money to fix them like we did just a couple of years ago.  This problem of lack of repair and upkeep can be found in most (maybe all) government owned facilities.  We seem to be living off of the hard work of the last generation, not our current efforts.
Our health care crisis is a symptom of this impoverishment.  We used to have one of the best health care systems in the world.  Now we seem to be somewhere near the bottom of the “first world” countries. Maybe it has gotten even worse than that.  Apparently we have millions of citizens who go without healthcare until their problems become true emergencies, when medical care becomes much more expensive and much less likely to be successful.  I am sure that there are millions who should have health care but don’t get it at all because it is not available to them.  Then there is that big (but rapidly shrinking) middle class that spends a huge portion of their income on health care.   We are getting far less service for a much larger percentage of our income.  
Our education system is another example of this deterioration.  When I went to school, America was known as having one of the best, and possible the best, education system in the world.  California was at the top in the nation.  Now California is somewhere near 48th from the top, and the nation as a whole has dropped to be towards the bottom of the developed countries.  We have move from being the leaders in education to barely being the followers.  I don’t think it is because of a lack of will, I don’t think we can afford to lead any longer (I also don’t think we can afford not to).  California is getting what it pays for. The amount that we pay per student is about 48th from the top, and we get results that align up pretty well with our spending.  I hear people say that we spend too much for education because we spend half of the State’s budget on it.  That doesn’t mean we spend too much on education, it means we spend too little overall.  We are not spending enough to keep up because we can’t afford to do more.
We consider ourselves to be very generous in helping the rest of the world, especially the poor and hungry.  If that is true, how come we are among the bottom of those contributing to world causes?  We seem to be spending about a tenth (per capita) as other developed countries. I don’t think it is because we are stingy and don’t want to contribute our fair share, I don’t think we can afford to do more.  We can’t even take care of our own, more or less those in other countries.  We are very generous at providing bombs and such to a few countries, and in trying to figure out how to repair the damage that those bombs did.  It would be far better to have used the last 200 billion dollars or so for taking care of business, rather than destruction.  We simply cannot afford to squander our resources on efforts such as the Iraq mess.  (It is clear that this money was squandered, there was no requirement to use the approach that we did.   There were many other much less expansive and less destructive approaches that could have been used but were not even tried.)
Not only do we seem to be losing ground rapidly in the realm of individual and government wealth, but we seem to be losing ground in social areas.  We are becoming meaner to each other and others in the world.  Rather than being open and caring, we seem to becoming selfish and prejudiced.  We would rather give up our freedoms so that we can invade other’s privacy than to just let other people be.  Our country seems to have taken the point of view that people who are different are “bad” and bad people need to be punished and forced to be like we want them to be. (I am not saying that we all do that – I personally try to avoid it.  I am talking about the majority and the government.  I think it is important to think of what our government does as being our will, it is not something that they do, it is something that we do, or we let happen.)
We seem to have exchanged our generally positive world view as being “the good guys” for one of being pushy, mean spirited, greedy and more of a problem than a solution.  In the terms used by our current President, it feels like we are using up our political capital.  We used to be the country and government that was looked up to as the goal.  Now we are shunned as the enemy.  We simply cannot continue on that path without paying the price that is inevitable.  We need to be viewed as a friend, not as an enemy or a problem by our peers.  
In addition to all of this, we are using up our natural resources rather than taking care of them.  We are trying to pump the last bits of oil out of our country rather than moving quickly toward alternatives and conservation.  It feels like the big oil folks are afraid that we really will find ways to get by without using up every last ounce of oil and that they will then end up missing an opportunity to sell all of the oil.  We are treating our forests and water in similar fashion.  We are hell bent on getting every dollar out of our resources as soon as possible, rather than looking at them from the long term prospective.  Our concern for the environment seems to be decreasing in step with our inability to pay for the other things that we need to be taking care of. Maybe it isn’t that we don’t care any longer, maybe we just can’t afford to take care of it any longer.