The more I talk about the economy, the more I complain to my friend, Chuch. Well, this is now my complaint to the world. We as a people, instead of owning up to the problem, continue to live outside of our means. Our bank accounts are looking like endless red numbers. We seek after the things we crave by going into debt. No longer is a penny saved, a penny earned. Instead, we should say a penny spent is 10 pennies in "no interest payments until 2000 whenever."

Were consumer debt the only problem, I wouldn’t bother my friend so much. But when contrasted with government spending in the last decade, consumer debt seems like chump change. Many will agree that government spending has gone too far. In the last 10 years this debt has more than doubled and is now growing at a faster rate than ever. The more information I learn concerning this problem, the more I complain to my friend, Chuch. And with every complaint comes the response, “Why don’t you do something about it?”

This is where I take my stand.

If we don't take action now, our national debt will continue to rise and will have an end result in one of the three following ways:

1. The government will have to raise taxes. This sounds really easy in theory, especially since Obama is promising to tax only the rich. However, this would be devastating to the economy in a number of ways. If you set a high tax for those who are making a great deal of money, you are, for the most part, taxing business owners. A high tax would mean that they would not make money for starting a business and would take away the incentive for doing such. A direct result of this would be that businesses would not be able to flourish or provide as many jobs. In addition, unemployment would skyrocket. I don’t want to completely throw this option out because it would eventually come to this, but I think that it will need to come from the entire nation and we can all expect our standard of living to drop as this is employed. Basically, by taxing the rich we are giving less money to the people who write our paychecks! Before we even start talking about raising taxes, let’s start cutting back on government spending.

2. The government will print more money causing a rapid inflation. As is, the government prints more money than is destroyed each year, inflating the dollar by about 3% per year. That means that the value your dollar has today is worth 3% less next year. The government could easily pay off its debt in its entirety by just printing more money. That would be like owing 100 dollars and then in essence paying it off with 50 dollars because you dropped the value of your dollar to be worth only that. If we did this, we would, as a nation, lose all credibility to the nations to whom we owe the money— principally Japan, China, India, and the Middle East. What this means for us individually is if you had $1,000 in the bank, the purchasing power of that money would drop, which is the same as taking your money away. So, to put it simply, printing more money is not the best solution.

3. If no measures are taken to pay off our national debt, our nation will go bankrupt. If all of the countries who are keeping us afloat decided to cash in on our debts, we would have no possible way to pay them off, especially since our debt continues to climb. Not only is our debt climbing, but we are paying close to 5% a year on it- that is over 500 billion dollars a year in interest. Possible consequences of the bankruptcy of the wealthiest nation in the world are very bleak. Markets around the world would crash and poverty would abound.

As we can see, we need to take immediate action to correct this problem with our national debt. If our politicians in Washington won’t do anything about it, we need to let them hear our voice. For this reason we have created this blog to keep you informed of our national debt and other pertinent social issues and to inspire people to let their voices be heard. We want this blog to be both informative and interactive, so please feel free to post comments and send us ideas about topics of discussion. Some of our topics of discussion for the near future include capitalism, personal accountability, national accountability, Obama’s promises to the nation, Reagonomics, and other such pertinent issues.

Sincerely yours,

Josh Oaks—Chief Editor
Chuch—Editor
Brutus—Editor
Matt—Tech.

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