After almost 8 years of incredible mismanagement by the Bush Administration, America is in a state of complete shamble. Last year, I took a photographs of a graffiti sprayed on a crumbling house in the lower 9th ward in New-Orleans; it said " America needs help". This is probably, in a nutshell, the most accurate political statement of today.
The numbers can make one's head spin. Our budget deficit is 9 trillion, the dollar has reached record low against currencies such as the Euro, the Yen, and the Pound.The low dollar is not really helping our manufacturing sector either, it is more or less gone thanks to the strategy of corporation such as Wall Mart of exporting jobs to India and China. The jobs left to maximize corporate profit and they won't come back.In this insane hyper-capitalist logic Americans were supposed to be the eternal consumer with a credit card never maxed out.
Well, guest what, Americans ( except the super wealthy ) are going broke. Since the burst of the real estate bubble, they can not borrow on their houses any longer. In the mean time, the skyrocketing oil prices is triggering inflation. In the last few weeks, the Feds had to take over a Bank and are tracking a few on their " at risk " of going under list.
The so call economical " stimulus" from the Bush administration ( remember the $600.00 you spent already) was insulting, inefficient and pure political pandering. Another symptoms of the drastic economical misconception of this administration. Bush wanted people to spend the money....well they should have saved the money instead.
Americans have been spending money they don't have for too long consuming stuff they quite often don't need. It is time to re-think our behavior or face the consequences. What we have being doing for years with our own financing management reflect at a much smaller scale the " economic model" of the Bush crack team. The best example is the two wars on installment plan ( with money borrowed from China and Japan) at a cost of 1 trillion combined and counting.
What the next president will have to do to prevent America to become a 2nd or even a 3rd world country is to revisit the type of ideas that FDR implemented to take America out of the great depression in the " New Deal". The next president and the next Congress will have to put a real stimulus plan together, not based on consumer spending but one focusing on fixing the infrastructure of the countries ( roads, bridges, levees, sewage systems, ports, public transportation).
Our country is falling apart, and spending on infrastructure generate much more growth than cutting taxes.
We also need to re-think our conception of " free market" in the long run. It is a paradox that the Bush administration, now a day, is practicing a socialized capitalism consisting of private gain and public losses. With just happened with Fannie & Freddie is an illustration of this point.
It is time to spend money in America not on wars that we can't either afford or win.
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3 comments:
This is so utterly true! But the wealthy have been turning their dollars into Euros, and they will just move on to other, more pleasant places when America finally collapses under its own weight of debt incurred on their behalf.
You are right Angela, the notion of nation will only matter for the " little people".Hyper-capitalism is a race too the bottom for the middle class, the power and profit in the hands of the CEO's and top share holders of mega corporations. However, a system so unbalanced and unfair in nature can not last for ever, in the end the many always triumph over the few.
Do you really want to let the government take more of our money in taxes to finance another boondoggle which will be used to pay for more pet projects and pork barrel spending? Do you not undestand how government works? They will raise taxes, create a new government agency, staff it with lawyers loyal to which ever party is in power and few if any Americans will actually get jobs or ever see a dime of the money while our governing elite will travel around the world hobnobbing with every dictator and international do-gooder they can find. While this is going on and you sit at home waiting for the jobs to come to the people in the streets, the scourge of sharia law will be implemented here as well as everywhere else in the world!
What we need is to demand that the manufacturing jobs be retuned to the continental United States, that taxes be lowered to allow greater investment in our own economy, protect our markets here at home by denying most favored nation status to China and others around the world who are raping our economy. We need to take our governmnet back from the lazy, greedy hacks who inhabit the halls of our government today. And you can't do that by giving the government more power. You must allow them less power and keep more of it for yourself. We are in the most critical period of our history since the civil war! Things cannot be fixed by the politicians in Washington, no matter how much they speak of hope and change. Hope means nothing and change is a relative term. We can change from bad to worse, you know. And what you propse will lead us toward that kind of change.
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