What Are We Going To Do About It?

If there were any doubts, this week should confirm the fact that our country is in deep $#!&. We were (are?) closer to a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system than most people will ever realize, and that’s just one of a number of crises that are boiling up:

1. The root of the recent bailouts and bankruptcies, we’ve still got at least another year of the housing/mortgage mess before it bottoms out.
2. Our cheap and easy to extract supplies of oil are dwindling while worldwide demand is increasing, causing energy prices to reach to new heights.
3. The world’s food supply hasn’t kept up with its population growth, leading to record inflation in commodities such as corn and rice.
4. Health care costs in this country are out of control, and too many of our citizens aren’t getting the preventative care or catastrophic treatments they need.
5. We’re witnessing a slow-motion disaster with the Medicare and Social Security systems, which are respectively facing insolvency in 2019 and 2017 or 2040 (depending on who you ask).
6. The national debt is increasing at a rate of nearly $2 billion per year, with no reason to believe that trend is going to go down anytime soon.
7. The value of the U.S. dollar is near its all time low, which does increase U.S. exports but has exacerbated the rise in oil and other commodities.
8. Our students are being eclipsed in math and science by kids in many other countries, pointing to a bad future for science, technology, and engineering in this country.
9. Growth in real wages had been stagnant, and has recently become negative thanks in large part to inflation created by a number of items from above.
10. And to make the list an even 10, let’s thrown in the United States’ complete nonresponse to globalization – In particular, the rise of China and India .

So our country is facing all of the immediate and long-term problems listed above (along with some others), while our law and policy makers are twiddling their thumbs. Neither major party has done anything of substance to actually fix these problems. Instead, they’re engaging in every sort of short-term pandering opportunity that gives the appearance of progress (“drill, baby, drill!!”) while punting the fallout for some future generation to deal with.

Our people and our government are in debt, we’ve based our economy on a fossil fuel with a finite supply, we can’t take care of our most vulnerable citizens, and we’re soon going to be eclipsed as a world power by China. So, seriously, I’m asking: What are we going to do about it?