whitnebrat wrote:
Looking ahead, I see three distinct problems that are facing the country within the next five to ten years. If they are not solved by then, then we as a country are in jeopardy.
First is climate change. It doesn't matter who or what is causing it, it only matters that it's happening. The answer to it from most reputable climate scientists is to cut down the carbon footprint (carbon dioxide emissions, etc.) and go to a 100% renewable energy platform. This means a massive change in the way we do things. If it doesn't happen, then the weather will become more severe; disastrous storms will get more disastrous; and what we now consider to be the 'breadbasket' of corn, wheat and soybeans in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska (plus a few more) will move north to Alberta and Saskatchewan, This will leave the Corn Belt to become the modern equivalent of the Dust Bowl, and displace hundreds of thousands of Americans who depended on those crops for a living.
The second problem that is imminent is that of the national debt. We currently have a national debt of over $21,000,000,000,000 (twenty-one-trillion). That equates to approximately $70,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It is financed by Treasury notes (national IOU's), which are primarily bought by other countries as an investment. China and Saudi Arabia are currently some of the foremost purchasers of our national debt and could disrupt our entire economy if they were to stop purchasing our debt or dump the T-bills that they have onto the world trading floors. This would crash the bond market and will cause at least a major recession or probably a depression (ala the 1930's only worse.) We have to get to a balanced budget and begin paying down this debt … it's that simple. Tax cuts and runaway spending don't help. The disruption of higher taxes and huge spending cuts at the federal level mean that the average American will not have the standard of living that they have become used to, and adjusting to that will become extremely difficult. The alternative to this is to 'print more money', which is effectively devaluing the dollar, causing runaway inflation and economic disaster … look at Venezuela or Brazil (or Germany in the 1930's) for the effects of this.
Debt of a different stripe is also looming in the loss of or inability to get jobs … mainly in the area of personal loans (auto & student) that won't be repaid if the jobs aren't there.
Third, and most problematic is the loss of the manufacturing sector jobs in this country. They aren't coming back, not for lack of trying, but because of technological change and automation. This means the loss of many (if not most) of the old "shock absorber washer stuffer" or "data entry clerk" type of jobs that we once had. Cashier-less markets, automated fast-food outlets, and retail stores are already being implemented. This will create a permanent underclass of people that cannot become robot maintainers or software coders or their equivalent, no matter how much training you give them … they are just not capable of it. Even many white-collar jobs are beginning to be eliminated by automation and artificial intelligence. Former managers are working at Walmart as greeters. What do you do with these people whose employment prospects are almost zero? If they don't have any way of making a living, and can't feed their families, you have the potential of mass rioting that will make the Watts riots look like minor scuffles. Historically, the French revolution was caused by just this problem. Here, it eventually will become (if it isn't already here) necessary to pay these people to not riot, which means a welfare state on a major scale. One answer is to 'de-technologize' many industries just to give people work and keep them from civil strife. Once you go this route, at least you have tax-paying citizens instead of the non-tax-paying underclass that is non-productive and a drain on the federal treasury.
There are other factors that are possibilities that could massively disrupt our way of life, but these three are the major disasters looming in the near future. To ignore them is to create a country that is vastly different and vastly worse off then the one we have now. Ignore them at your (and your children's children's) peril.
Looking ahead, I see three distinct problems that ... (
show quote)
The global warming (climate change) is a natural phenomenon. It has been politicized by globalist factions as a way to redistribute the wealth of productive nation's to less productive ones, and as a means for a lot of people, such as scientists living high on the hog on federal grants, Algore, etc. For some reason they never get around to mentioning that the planet was much hotter in the late 1800s, among other periods that came before, when man was not burning even a fraction of the fossil fuels we do today and not even a fraction as industrialized.
The only ways to pay down the national debt are to have Americans working and paying into the treasury. This doesn't require heavy taxation, just the aggregate of a low unemployment population, and a curtailment of unnecessary government spending. That includes trimming out the very large excess of federal employees and keeping the necessary employees total respective compensations on a par with their private sector counterparts. There's no reason why a federal employee's total package (salary + benefits) should nearly double that of a private sector employee doing the same job with higher productivity requirements, and at the same time be guaranteed a higher retirement package than the Social Security the private sector worker is going to collect.
Then there's the "money's no object" attitude of many in government, to say nothing of most of our politicans, when it comes to general spending and long term obligations. Pork, etc. These items also need to be reevaluated.
President Trump's economic policies are working, they have reinstated a business friendly environment that has spawned a lowering unemployment rate, to the point that companies, particularly in the manufacturing sector, are having a harder and harder time finding new employees. One bi-product of this is that now employers are having to be more competitive, and that will bring up wages according to the laws of the marketplace rather than the artificial and destructive mandatory minimum wage increases that serve to create downsizing and/ or termination of businesses.
Then there are the millions of people out there, many of them young and strong, who suffer from treatable conditions that are instead treated as disabilities, who instead of being expected to work are put on disability along with various other taxpayer funded benefits. Among them are numerous young people with no disabilities who game the system because it's easy to get away with. Ask California.
Thusfar, President Trump's approach has been doing very well. Jobs are returning at a record pace, consumer confidence is still a level not seen in a long time and what is needed is for the current administration's policies to continue to work for America.
And they ARE working, but they need time to take their full effect, and unfortunately, Trump's political opposition is fighting and obstructing every inch of the way.
These people, despite all they claim to represent, do not represent the will and genius of America's founders nor the letter of the Constitution. While the Trump Administration does, today's Democrats, AND the mainstream media, instead represent an ideology that is the antithesis of the spirit of America that caused this nation to flourish as it did in the first 200 years of it's existence.
If anything is going to bring this great country down, it is that, the left wing ideology that has infected the Democratic Party and the media.