In A Time Of Crisis

In our recent economic crisis we, our government has come up with many ideas on how to create jobs, decrease national debt, and simply put… strength our crumbling economy.  It seems that everyone in Washington is trying to find a way to decrease our spending.  But no one considers one area of spending   too much….our congressmen’s salaries along with other government employees.  Why doesn’t anyone bring this up for question?  We are talking about being a troubled time, when we must make some sacrifices to get us out of the whole we are in, so why it is so bad to decrease their salaries a bit?  

Many government employees make more than the president!  The average salary for a congressmen is $174,000, and salaries for party leaders exceed that.  This doesn’t include all of the benefits they receive which is much greater than most of our professions offer.  And according to many sources this is increasing.

I am in no way trying to say that their jobs aren’t important and worthy of a substantial pay. But I do think they are entitled to a fair pay… not an enormous and lucrative one, just because they are politicians and apparently we have so much money we are giving out raises consistently.

It is fair to say they hold the important task of running our government, and should be paid accordingly, but I can’t understand how we are in a debt crisis and while so many people are losing their jobs because of how bad our economy is our government employees are getting raises with their already high salaries.  Maybe it’s time we cap that!     

"Increasing NASA's Budget"

I find the commentary on “Increasing NASA’s Budget” by Chelse Martin www.americanspushingthedebt.blogspot.com interesting because it brings up space exploration, a topic I rarely see in headlines anymore.  I agree with this commentary, but for different reasons. I too have strong religious beliefs, but I don’t see a catastrophic event as the only  reason to invest in space exploration. I too believe the country is spending too much money on things that shouldn’t be a top priority.  While space exploration is important and we should work to be a leader in it, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I do believe NASA’s funding should be decreased, as it has.  I wish this commentary had a bit more information on the original authors facts and claims to better understand his point of view but all in all I think the commentary was well written and to the point. 

U.S. Trade Deficit

In recent years our economy has made the headlines for its undeniable crisis.  Our high unemployment rates, increasing debt and trade deficit are just some of the problems we face.  We’ve heard about it time and time again, but how do we begin to fix this? 

I think we need to focus on our trade deficit with China to start.  China is known as a currency manipulator, they lower their currency so that then their exports are cheaper than our exports.  This then affects our manufacturing, our jobs.  It’s a domino effect. We need to end tax breaks for companies taking jobs overseas, and decrease tax on manufacturers doing business here.  This will offer them an incentive for creating business here and will in turn create more jobs.  Then our economy will become stronger. 

We need to do whatever is necessary to get our jobs here and I really think it lies in formulating a plan to get businesses to manufacture here and not outsourcing.  Our standards for trade with China need to tighten.  China looks for its financial interest, and if we set in place limits or standards that they must abide by if they want our business they will, but not doing so will just continue to fuel a dependency on them.