Barrack Obama took office hoping to be the “President of Change”. He may be the first twenty-first century president to serve only one term and go down as the “wrong man for the job.” When Barrack took office the United States had a very large National Debt, was fighting two wars neither of which anyone ever expected us to win, and problems in our economy that all dated back long before he took office. The result is that he was not able to extract the United States from either the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war, although he promised to do so; he was unable to jump start the economy even with a large charge of trillions of dollars that ultimately added to the National Debt; and last of all, he found it impossible to solve the mortgage crisis, the unemployment crisis, or the sluggish economy that was the result of years of bad management and reckless speculation by Wall Street and the U.S. Government.
Barrack may go down in history as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century. The problems that surfaced were not necessarily those of his making but something that he inherited. He acted as his predecessors had acted probably not realizing that the National Debt was near a breaking point. All previous Presidents had really never dealt with the trade deficit – the result of a severe dependence on foreign oil; had never considered the cumulative effects that the annual budget deficits were having on the credit strain of the United States; the outsourcing of jobs in the United States to foreign countries that left us with no manufacturing base and that jeopardized our weak Social Security structure; or years and years of bad economic policy that shifted the debt of the United States to the budgets of the 50 States and ultimately to the cities of America.
I had a friend of mine that retired from the Bureau of Public Debt, a division of the United States Treasury that had worked as an analyst for 40 years. During the time that he served, he never saw or worked with a balanced budget! This is sad as he had no control over the budget input that he received. His job was to forecast the weekly billions of dollars that the United States Treasury had to borrow to basically stay afloat.
The United States has a staggering debt. A debt that, if addressed properly, will reduce our standard of living for years to come! Our defense budget must be reduced. We cannot afford to be the policeman of the world. Our entitlement programs cannot be sustained at their present levels. Both Social Security and Medicare are costing more than the benefits that they bring to the people they serve with a declining labor base for future collections. Obama Care is a program that may have to be postponed or reduced to fit within the constraints of our current budgets. I feel sorry in a way for Barrack as he was not prepared for the economic crisis that has been dumped on his plate.
If the United States is unable to come up with a deficit reduction plan that allows for an increase in the ceiling of the National Debt but at the same time allows for a serious reduction in spending, we will be in for what I forecast as a Depression of unbelievable magnitude. We have lived for years on money that we did not have. Our whole debt structure is predicated upon shifting forward a debt that was well beyond our means of ever paying off. Whether we believed as a country that we could someday pay off this mounting debt, we may never know but the day of reckoning is at hand.
