By John Bird, Victor
It’s no longer just Republican vs Democrat or liberal vs conservative. It’s the 1 percent vs the percent, rural vs urban, white men against the world. Climate doubters clash with believers. Bathrooms have become battlefields, borders are battle lines. Sex and race, faith and ethnicity, the melting pot seems to be boiling over. Our national direction is being determined by special-interest groups who demand “rights” while denying the legitimate rights of others. As a result, opportunity, productivity and even the promise of meaningful employment are being destroyed. Freedom and responsibility are being exchanged for dependence and entitlement. Excessive government spending is bankrupting the country and robbing future generations of the opportunity to succeed through honest labor.
In the past, the U.S. economy was being slowly but surely destroyed and many Americans had no idea that it was happening. That is at least partially due to the fact that most financial news is entirely focused on the short-term. Long story short, the reality is that there were certain underlying foundational problems that were destroying the U.S. economy a little bit more every single day.
Long-Term Trend #1: The Deindustrialization of America
Starting in the ’50s and ’60s the United States was being deindustrialized at a pace that is almost impossible to believe.
Long -Term Trend #2: The Exploding U.S. Trade Deficit
Each month, tens of billions more dollars go out of the United States than come into it. In other words, every single month the United States gets poorer.
Long-Term Trend #3: The Shrinking Middle Class
As jobs continue to flee the United States and as wages continue to be depressed, America’s middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, a growing number of Americans have found it impossible to make it from month to month without direct financial assistance from the federal government. This is quite evident from the last government shutdown.
Long-Term Trend #4: The Growing Size of the U.S. Government.
No matter whether it is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, the size of the U.S. government has continued to grow by leaps and bounds in recent years. This is a tremendous drain on the U.S. economy. The government produces very little value for the economy and yet costs a colossal amount to maintain.
Long-Term Trend #5: The Constantly Growing U.S. National Debt
The United States has accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and every single month it gets worse. We are literally destroying our economic future with all of this debt.
Long-Term Trend #6: The Ongoing Devaluation of the U.S. Dollar
The Federal Reserve constantly destroys the value of the U.S. dollar. Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power.
Long-Term Trend #7: The Derivatives Bubble
The one thing that the “Wall Street Reform Bill” should have done was something about the horrific abuses in the derivatives markets. Instead, this bill did next to nothing and instead imposed hundreds of other useless regulations on Wall Street.
Long-Term Trend #8: The Health Care Industry
The United States health care system is completely and totally broken. It has become a gigantic money making machine for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and greedy lawyers. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world and yet they get shockingly little in return.
Long-Term Trend #9: Financial Power is Becoming Concentrated in Fewer and Fewer Hands
Once upon a time the United States had a very diverse financial system. Today financial power is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with each passing year. Putting an increasing amount of financial power into the hands of just a few elite banks is a recipe for disaster any way you want to cut it.
Long-Term Trend #10: The growing Retirement Crisis That Threatens to Bankrupt America
Social Security is a total mess, our government in the past had decided to steal the funds from Social Security and Medicare which will not be returned. This amounted to over two trillion dollars. Government and corporate pension plans are underfunded by more than ten trillion dollars and at some point, both systems will become bankrupt.
An increasing number of Americans are starting to realize that something is wrong although they may not know the specifics, they do realize our system is broken. We are very much on the wrong track. We have squandered the great wealth that our parents and grandparents left us and we are wrecking the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.
This did not happen overnight and it will not be corrected within our lifetime, it’s far more complex a problem than one might think. One thing for sure if we fail to place the proper constituents within our State and Federal governments and hold them accountable for their actions this will never end and our Republic will have failed without a shot being fired. The problems we face are not caused as a result of either “Republican or Democrat” party lines but because both parties have failed to construct proper laws during their time in Washington DC to keep this Republic afloat. They have been self-serving and have failed America and the American people.
For the sake of our country’s future, leaders must lay aside their pride and self-serving agendas in order to come together with wisdom and common sense at the table of reason in dialogue with respect and humility to hammer out effective solutions to the difficult realities we face.