The Real Issue in American Politics
-Pete V.
The buzz on the street is about the war in Iraq, the economy, free medical care, and host of other issues facing Americans as we head into our 2008 presidential election. What surprises me is that most Americans are clueless about the biggest issue facing us as a nation; our financial health and survival. Imagine this situation; you and your family are having hard times. Food and gas are more expensive and jobs are becoming less plentiful. To deal with these issues, you do the following things: You tell your boss that you want a pay cut, since you know how hard things are for the company and want your boss to be happy. You also put all your bills; your utilities, your groceries, and your car payments on a credit card. You live like this for 8 years and then you tell your kids, when you grow up, you kids have to pay off this credit card. This is tantamount to what the Bush administration has done. By giving people tax cuts, they’ve basically told the boss who pays their paycheck to give the government less money. By consistently running an average debt of 480 billion a year, they’ve basically paid their bills on a credit card that they’re handing off to our kids.
Think about this. It took us 230 years as a country to accumulate 5.6 trillion dollars of debt. It took George W. Bush only 8 years to accumulate 4 trillion dollars of debt. He racked up enough debt in just 8 years to match what our great country took 200 years to owe. To most debt-ridden Americans, this doesn’t scare them. I’ll tell you, it scares me. It scares me even more that neither Obama nor McCain are discussing this issue. To put this in terms of how this affects every single American, it would require every working tax-payer to pay $68,000 to pay off our national debt. So that little $600 stimulation check you got from the government or that $1000 savings you got from the Bush tax cut plan, it’s all a big lie. The honest and ugly truth is that Americans need to be taxed heavily to pay off that huge debt. No one likes taxes; I don’t. I do realize though what the numbers are saying and I now understand why an American has to pay $1.50 to get just one Euro. How could the value of European money become 50 percent stronger than ours in just 10 years? We’re supposed to be the most financially strong and innovative country in the world. Our money doesn’t show that, however. That’s the reason why our gas and our food costs more, because our buying power is less. Many Americans are clueless, but the bright people in other countries are not. They say those American dollars are worth less since they have 9.5 trillion dollars to pay off before their money is worth anything. You, I, and our kids are paying the price.
Of the 9.5 trillion dollars we owe as a country, 7 trillion of that debt was accumulated by the last three Republican presidents; Reagan, Bush, and W. Bush. None of the three has ever attempted to pay off any of the debt that their predecessor generated. If you look at the history of the United States, there were many years when Presidents made big efforts to reduce the national debt. That ended with the Republicans of modern times. Very few see problems with having debt. Most of us owe $8000 or more on average in credit card debt. Many have defaulted on homes they couldn’t afford, causing the financial crisis affecting us and wiping out jobs and large companies. Look at what is happening to the largest, most secure banks and investment houses in the country; Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Merrill Lynch. If you asked a financial expert 10 years ago, if these banks would ever go down, you would have gotten a laugh. If you think the great United States can never suffer from its huge debt, think again.
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