{"id":4326,"date":"2011-06-02T18:42:43","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T00:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonapollovoss.local\/?p=4326"},"modified":"2018-09-21T02:06:11","modified_gmt":"2018-09-21T06:06:11","slug":"top-5-problems-facing-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2011\/06\/02\/top-5-problems-facing-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 5 Problems Facing the Economy 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Among <a href=\"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web2011\/05\/29\/what-my-intuition-tells-me-now-top-5-problems-facing-the-economy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the top five problems facing the economy<\/a> is politics trumping what needs to be done.\u00a0 In the government space, I consider the following to be big problems:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Continued deficit spending and growing national debt<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Lack of a coherent foreign policy &#8211; including fighting two Asian wars<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Lack of financial support for financial regulators<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">In this series I have already talked about the Federal government&#8217;s inability to run a balanced budget.\u00a0 As of 2 May, 2011 this inability to balance a budget has resulted in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justfacts.com\/nationaldebt.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a total national debt of: $14.3 trillion<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Budgeting has two levers, revenues and expenditures.\u00a0 Given that there seems to be very little willpower or sense of sacrifice on the part of most U.S. citizens to have taxes\/revenues increased, then a balanced budget is going to have to come about through a reduction in expenditures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justfacts.com\/nationaldebt.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.justfacts.com<\/a> many of the expenditures that are to be made and that are massively underfunded, are things like Social Security and Medicare.\u00a0 The 2009 breakout of the debt is as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">61% for social spending<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">22% for national defense<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">10% for general government and debt service<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">4% for economic affairs and infrastructure<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">2% for public order and safety<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">In the realm of social spending there is a lack of political willpower because any politician that threatens to roll back these expenditures is labeled by his\/her political opponent as wanting to kill them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">As long as the voting public continues to vote for candidates who do not favor a serious national discussion about these programs then it will be difficult to witness real change in the national debt.\u00a0 So here, unfortunately, politics trumps what needs to be done.\u00a0 We truly need to come together on this issue as citizens of a single country, not a divided body politic.\u00a0 Duh!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Another gigantic source of the national debt is military spending.\u00a0 Unfortunately, most budget discussions don&#8217;t include the full costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because a lot of the funding for these wars has been considered of an &#8220;emergency&#8221; nature and therefore is not a part of the annual budgetary review process.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">According to the Congressional Research Service&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fas.org\/sgp\/crs\/natsec\/RL33110.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9\/11<\/a>,&#8221; the costs for the War on Terror have been:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">$806 billion for Iraq<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">$444 billion for Afghanistan<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">$29 billion for &#8220;enhanced security&#8221;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">$6 billion for unallocated, miscellaneous expenses<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">So here we have $1.285 trillion in costs so far for these two wars, both of which, in my opinion, are well past the point of conclusion.\u00a0 In Iraq, we so destabilized the balance of power between Iran and Iraq that Iran has filled the power vacuum created by the deposing of Sadaam Hussein.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Unfortunately, the Iraqi people were never a homogenous nation.\u00a0 Instead, they were held together by a ruthless, murderous bastard.\u00a0 But\u00a0 nonetheless, Iran was held in check.\u00a0 Sans Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people have coalesced into their old sectarian divisions with a majority of the people sympathetic to Iran.\u00a0 In the absence of a true Iraqi national identity that trumps religious sect loyalties, Iraq is sure to be unstable for generations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Given that it is going to be unstable there regardless of U.S. action, I say get out now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">A similar situation exists in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Though, the power vacuum there will be filled by the Taliban, instead of Iran.\u00a0 We never &#8220;won&#8221; the war in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Instead, like every population that has occupied that region for thousands of years when the realm was invaded, the native folk fled to the hills to wait for the occupying nation to lose interest.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Despite U.S. military power, it is designed to destroy, not to occupy.\u00a0 Virtually nothing we can do militarily there will make a difference for the long-term.\u00a0 What&#8217;s more, we literally have zero strategic interest in being there since al Qaeda&#8217;s ouster almost ten years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Given that it is going to be unstable there regardless of U.S. action, I say get out now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The relief to the U.S. national debt burden of ending these two unnecessary wars will be huge.\u00a0 Unfortunately, politics has trumped what needs to be done in this arena.\u00a0 In fact, Obama specifically ran his presidential campaign saying that Afghanistan should have been the real war.\u00a0 It was and its goals were accomplished.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">As an American do you feel safer than you did just after 9\/11?\u00a0 If &#8220;yes,&#8221; then &#8220;mission accomplished&#8221; and we can move on and make better use of the monies tied up in the wars.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">If your answer is &#8220;no,&#8221; then might I ask you just how many trillions of dollars it will take to make you feel safe?\u00a0 I would argue that a sense of personal safety begins within, and that it has very little to do with what is going on without.\u00a0 The fact is that most of us live in a very safe neighborhood, within safe states, within a safe country, on a generally safe planet.\u00a0 It&#8217;s time to move on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">But coupled with this is President Barack Obama&#8217;s lack of a coherent foreign policy.\u00a0 He is been in office for almost 2.5 years and I still am not sure what he stands for internationally.\u00a0 What I would like to see him do with foreign policy focus is to find a way to cope with two regional hegemons: Iran and Russia.\u00a0 Additionally, it is appropriate to put real pressure on China to end its fixed yuan to dollar exchange rate that has cost the U.S. economy billions and billions of dollars.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Last, but not least, I have written many, many times about the chronic under regulation of the financial markets, and the chronic underfunding of the regulatory bodies actually charged with enforcing what regulations are in place.\u00a0 So I won&#8217;t belabor the point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">However, I will point out that the Securities and Exchange Budget of $1.4 billion compares to approximately $4.1 billion spent on &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usgovernmentspending.com\/budget_current_gs.php?year=2011_2016&amp;view=1&amp;expand=0060808888M&amp;expandC=352&amp;units=b&amp;fy=fy12\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Recreational and sporting services<\/a>,&#8221; or <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.forbes.com\/halahtouryalai\/2011\/02\/17\/10-wall-street-expenses-that-make-the-secs-budget-look-pathetic\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$2.3 billion in salaries and benefits spent in just one quarter by one Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs<\/a>.\u00a0 Tell me that the comparison doesn&#8217;t make the SEC&#8217;s budget look absurdly low to you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among the top five problems facing the economy is politics trumping what needs to be done.\u00a0 In the government space, I consider the following to be big problems: Continued deficit spending and growing national debt Lack of a coherent foreign policy &#8211; including fighting two Asian wars Lack of financial support for financial regulators In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}