Think about our spending habits, priorities before you vote
To the Times: Americans are horrified by mass killings but don’t seem to care if the government does it. Most people know that the mess in the Middle East was caused by a series of missteps by America since 2003. Wars in Iraq, Libya and starting the civil war in Syria allowed ISIS to form, destroyed the countries, killed millions and caused millions more to be refugees now flooding other countries.
America has no vital interest in the M.E. yet Washington, the foreign-funded think tanks and the main media are ramping up the threat of Iran as a prelude to war. Iran is no threat to nuclear-armed Israel and certainly no threat to us. It seems to be driven by Saudi Arabia and Israel for their own political reasons. A war now with Iran would probably break the bank.
What we should be more concerned about is the $20 trillion debt and the stock market bubble, fueled by printing money and loaning it out practically for free. Consider that financial companies can borrow it and yet charge usurious rates: Credit card debt was $905 billion in 2017 at – 15 percent interest. The fastrising credit card debt is because the real rate of inflation is greater than 5 percent (the government figure of less than 2 percent is patently false) and yet wages have stagnated since the 1980s. People can’t save and are being forced to use credit to live. It won’t end well. The new generation has little hope of buying a house and affording a family.
The number of new jobs has been decreasing each year for the last three years. How come the average wage has not increased with two million new jobs? Are they all for flipping hamburgers?
The propaganda about how well America is now doing has been very successful, but does not bear scrutiny. Only the top few percent are. The slums and homeless are not. America’s GDP has been growing at 2-3 percent, but China’s GDP keeps growing at more than twice that since 1970. It won’t take long before they are ahead of us. Communism is not supposed to work better than Congress.
When a country is very prosperous like the U.S. after WWII it can afford to build up its military. Ultimately the military keeps growing and destroys the economy. Exporting our manufacturing for shortterm profits didn’t help. Now we can’t afford 800 bases in 79 countries (Ron Paul says U.S. has military personnel in 130 nations and 900 overseas bases) and continuous wars. Iran or North Korea could be the final straw.
We can no longer afford $1 trillion a year on the military and its supporting alphabet soup of agencies, nor a health system that is two to eight times more expensive than other countries that all cover everyone.
Think before you vote. The real strength of a country is its economy, not the military. Think about the important issues not what the politicians wants to talk about.