A New Beginning or Beginning of the End

Looking around the Internets you see that a lot of other bloggers are writing their farewell posts to the Bush era. I guess there is something worth saying on the changing of the guard and the final departure of the worst President in the history of the Nation but I think I will let everybody else scatter the ashes. A lot of the posts here have been about the injustice, depravity, cowardice, avarice and hate that is the Bush presidency and frankly I don't feel like writing anymore about it. I have made my opinions and disgust clear enough I think, and there is just no sense in saying it all over again. Let's just say it was a moral and ethical atrocity and leave it at that.

I’m as excited about the Obama presidency as anyone else and I don't, by any means, want to rain on anyone's parade today, but I am worried. I am worried as in "not optimistic". I am not sure America has what it takes, regardless of how inspired our leader is, to make the sacrifices that are needed to get us back on track. Let's face some hard facts. The United States as a whole has been living beyond its means for over 30 years now. We have been shipping our fundamental economy overseas for decades. Our ability to manufacture the basics is now resident in the third world. We and our government have been living on the credit card for decades. We've bought the lower taxes mantra (look at California) and ignored the necessary investments we should have been making in infrastructure, education and all the other things that matter. Where would we be today if we had adopted a health care system like the French 30 years ago? How many trillions of dollars have we spent on guns instead of butter over the last 30 years?

We, as a nation, are in serious trouble. Any other nation would have collapsed by now. Argentina did and they were actually better off than we are right now when it happened. It is only our status as the United States, the world's greatest economy, that the rest of the world is still willing to pay us to consume and this is soon going to go away. It's unsustainable.

So we have a new and energetic president as of tomorrow. If he is willing to lead us, are we ready to follow? Are we ready, as a nation, to make the sacrifices necessary to bring the world back into balance? If not, we are facing serious trouble. We cannot continue to ignore the basic economics of living beyond your means. Sooner or later the bills come due.