Posted by
James Burns on Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:48:26 AM
Barack Obama has found great inspiration for his presidency in Abraham Lincoln. Which is a good thing. Lincoln reunited the United States after the civil war and ended slavery. This was a great feat because slavery was so popular in this country, that was supposed to believe in all men are created equal.
FDR has been credited with the ending of the Great Depression. FDR came up with the New Deal to help stimulate our economy by creating infrastructure projects and other job creating methods to help end the Depression. He also gave us the know failing Social Securtiy Act. Now economists and historians are starting to agree that FDR did not end the Depression with the New Deal, but rather the United States entering into World War 2 ended it.
The massive war effort by the United States entering the war on many fronts created jobs all acrossed American. With the waves of men needed in the military, many of these jobs were taken by women. Factories were retooled to create tanks, jeeps, bombs, planes, guns etc. All these companies were given government money to retool and payment for the goods being produced. This is what stimulated the economy and got us out of the Depression. The patriotism during those days has been unsurpassed in any other conflict our country has been in since. We lost that in Vietnam thanks to our government.
Bringing us into today, Obama wants to reunite the country through community organization. While I believe acts of charity and volunteering are a good thing, not all can be accomplished in this way. The Bible states we are to help the poor, widowed orphaned and old. Yet we must not be forced into it by the government. I have seen on the television advertisements companies rewarding people for volunteering. Starbucks is giving away free coffee to those who perform five hours of community service. In our troubled times it is going to be very hard to get people to volunteer. People right now are trying to find jobs, or gain mutilpe jobs to generate income to equal the job they have lost. Saving their homes and families well beings are the most important things on peoples minds at this time.
Obama also wants an unpresidented monsterosity of a stimulus plan to "bring us out of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression." This right here is a lie. During the Carter administration unemployement was double digit. Interest rates were well over 20%. inflation was also double digit. I would think that is worse than today. The problem today is people are so used to functioning on free credit that they have forgotten how to function within their means. Being creative with the resources they have and making them stretch. Not just "putting it on plastic," and figuring it out later. Even the government is not concerned about it's growing debt as it tries to pass this stimulus. Obama in this stimulus wants to create jobs by infrastructure projects. Analyst state that if this is passed at the current size it is now, every man women and child will have an addition $7000 dollars in national debt tacked on to them. Much of this money will not be available immediately, much will be spent after Obama would be out of a second term and the end of this recession. How responsible is that? Plus were will this money come from? The United States does not have it. We will have to borrow it from China, Saudi Arabia etc. These countries don't like us much anyway. I sure don't want to tie my self anymore than we already are to them.
What this shows me is that one history does repeat itself, two we as a country do not learn from our mistakes. We saw the New Deal did not work. So why do it again? We see that free easy credit does not work, so why bring the very system back that created it back? So we can have this mess happen again? I think not. Lets relearn what we have been taught in the past. Things like living in our means in our private lives as well as in government. Frugality needs to be the norm not the exception. Making ever important dollar stretch for as much as it is worth. Then I think once we do this we can go and work on uniting the country on a common set of core values. Being able to do as the Bible states and help those less fortunate than we are. But what good will those efforts be without a firm base of values for these people to stand on and make it. We need to not make the past mistakes again but rather sucesses for our future.