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drmarkmedman
12-02-2008, 12:18 PM
This is a short paper I wrote the other day.


As of November 30, 2008 and 9:00 pm the national debt of the United States of America is currently $10,664,030,068,767.07, and I do assure you as you are reading this did not go down. (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/) With a debt nearing eleven trillion dollars, you must ask yourself, is that an o.k. thing to have? In simple terms, it is not. The better question is, who is responsible for such and obvious overspending and mismanagement of our nation’s funds? Could it be us, as the citizens of this great land? If that is the case, then you owe Uncle Sam quite a bit of money – something to the tune of $34,902.06. This is not a rational solution. The better solution may be for us as people to retake control of our government, and take a bigger role of making sure are money is spent in our best interests. The great country that is the United States of America seems closer to falling due to its insane economic policies. There are three causes that I can see as major factors in getting the United States into this fiscal mess. The first is spending money outside of U.S. territory. The second is paying for our military empire that the government seems to be building up more and more every day. The third issue is the government playing around in the free market, and not letting it be so free any more, and the rise of socialism.



Wasteful spending outside of our border is costing us more money then we can bare. There is a country in the Middle East called Israel, basically one of two U.S. allies in that region of the world. The other is Iraq, which I will discuss at a later point. Israel has long been our ally in that region since its creation by the British after the war which within itself causes a lot of the problems we face today. That region seems to be nothing but pure chaos, but that story is for another time. We have helped that nation countless times over and over, from providing them with a nuclear bomb to just writing them a blank check every year just to help them out - a check to the tune to two billion dollars. With a debt of ten trillion, it is the principle of the situation. The ironic part is their country has very little debt. It is one of the very many situations of just pure poor financial management that our country has. Just incase you don’t get it, we borrow money from countries like China to pay Israel, who does not really need the money at all, even though we ourselves don’t have any money. Another instance of wasteful spending outside our border is the U.N. or United Nations. “UN peacekeeping is funded mainly through assessments on member states based on their wealth. The United States pays about 28 percent of these assessments, and ten nations together pay nearly 90 percent of the total budget”. (Peters) Besides the fact that it is illegal for us to be in such a group, we also shell out billions upon billions of dollars to it. The logic behind it is this: If we can run around the world and try to spend as much as we can, everybody else will like us. This is just plain wrong on so many different levels. It has been established in the past that to be in the United Nations is unconstitutional, hence making it an illegal body for us to join. Even worse then being in a group which we don’t belong, we are also one of the top contributors to said group. All of this just goes back to the whole point of poor spending as a government. We need to make better choices on how we spend money in this country. Every day we face taxes, whether it be on your pay check every week or just running to the store to pick up a few things. So do you want your money spent on things that don’t do anything but hurt you in the long run? I sure don’t.



The war on the Middle East and other parts of the world is not only bringing down the safety of our country, but it is also harming our economy. Through the spread of democracy, we have managed to spend a whole lot of money. None of which has seemed to do a whole lot of good. We have spent billions and billons of dollars in Iraq to due what? Still so many years later, it is still a war-torn nation. We have more and more soldiers dead, which is the highest price tag of the war. But the United States check does not stop at just that one nation; we have over 700 bases in 130 countries around the world (C4L). It takes a serious amount of money to run such an empire. I then pose the question, why do we need that? We have bases in Cuba, Germany, Canada, Japan and the list goes on and on. What is the point of all of this runaway spending? It is not necessary. The only thing it does is make us a less safe nation, because all the troops are not guarding our boundaries, they are in faraway nations not ready to respond to an attack on their own soil. Another place of interest is the countries of Russia and Georgia. These two nations were at war early this year. We wisely did not send troops to attack one country or the other, but what we did do was send billions of dollars to Georgia. This I found to be a very interesting move by the United States. It was not our war, Georgia did not attack us, Russia did not attack us, but yet for some reason we are getting involved. All it managed to due was help Georgia keep fighting Russia, and give Russia a real good reason not to like us. The real question is, how do you want your tax dollars spent on America? Making it a better nation or sending it to countries that most Americans cannot find on a map?



The only way a free market, which we in theory have here, can work is if we can somehow keep it free. The free market, in a nutshell, is the government providing us with a sound currency, and then getting out of the way. One example of how the government interferes with the free market is in agriculture. The government subsidizes the corn industry in order to make a fuel out of it. They also completely ban the importations of a very similar fuel from Brazil. Brazil can make that fuel using sugar at a much lower cost than the American corn growers can. So in the long run, we have to pay corn growers to grow the corn for fuel that costs more than the fuel we can get from Brazil. This only makes sense for one group only: the American corn growers, which have a huge lobby in Washington (Paul). There is also a similar situation with sugar industry, hence the reason why we don’t have pop with sugar in it anymore. We have high fructose corn syrup, also made from corn. There seems to be a bit of a pattern that I’m noticing, and the list of similar situations goes on from there. There are also instances where the government thinks they know what prices should be rather than what they are. Companies in general don’t just charge whatever they want for a product, there is tons of research and formulas to determine that. One of the many factors include how much of one thing or the other is available in the market. People are now paid by the government that live on land that is deemed farmable not to grow crops just to keep an artificial price on certain crops. In summary, the government takes your tax dollars, gives them to people for no good reason just so you the tax payer have to pay a higher price. This leads my least favorite event in American history: the bailout. The bailout of 2008 in a nutshell says we are going to take 700 billion dollars and buy up bad assets of banks. I’m going to give you $20 to invest in anything in the world, whether it be gold, silver, stocks of companies, currency, or bad loans that people made that had no business taking those loans in the first place. There is not a guaranteed right answer among the choices, but there is a sure fire loser amongst them. But the congress was pushed into it and we the tax payers were forced to make a very, very bad investment. This goes once again back to my very basic question, how do you want your tax dollars spent?



There are some people though who feel that these are very good ideas, as a matter of fact, neither one of the major candidates had very little to nothing at all to say about what they will change about these issues. They received 99% votes in the past election. I do believe that people are not overall in favor of these issues though I do think that they are either unaware of them or just don’t care. I blame a good part of this lack of education on the main stream media.



It is now 11:45 pm on November 30, 2008, the current national debt is now $10,664,441,385,559.48, and if each person were to divide the debt, each would owe $34,943.33 that is $41.27 more then it was last time. The United States seems ever closer to falling due to its insane economic policy, whether it is messing around outside the country, or starting wars that cost us billions of dollars, or messing around with the free market. It all just ends in disaster. We must come together and take a look at what matters for if we do I think we can be once again the best country the world has every seen.

drmarkmedman
12-02-2008, 08:44 PM
What do you guys think/ any thing i should change its still not do for a few days???

Athan
12-03-2008, 12:09 AM
Add some "federal reserve caused this mess" spice and wallah! Perfecto.

drmarkmedman
12-03-2008, 08:51 PM
bump