Source: BIZPAC Review
As we enter 2015, America has strayed from the path that led to historic greatness. But our nation’s future can regain its luster if we can eliminate six deadly dangers. Here are the huge obstacles on the road to returning to domestic stability, American exceptionalism and world leadership:
The shift away from the U.S. Constitution, the founding principles and the rule of law. Officials most guilty of producing social upheaval and economic disasters are the same villains who reject the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, and who hold the beliefs of the Founding Fathers as obsolete. Constitutional issues should be decided by legislative authority or democratic processes, not by activist judges who, by appointment, escape the natural vetting of elections. The way to alter any constitutional fault is by amendment. The best bet for preserving a strong republic is to stymie freewheeling, imperfect politicians who wish to do as they please by putting their own rules over the rule of law.
The failures of the American education system. Today’s high schools and colleges produce graduates who are illiterate on the topics of civics, personal responsibility, personal finance and the lessons of history. The system created adults who didn’t know what they didn’t know. Children who came of age during the period of great abundance (1979 to 2008) were handed the golden eggs laid by the great American goose. They never developed the habit of worrying about things going dark and the physical law of entropy in all things. Too many never learned the standards under which the failure or success of a nation is defined.
Budget deficits and unfunded liabilities. The federal governments driving the bus downhill on a dark and winding fiscal road that may end in a cliff, and the bus is picking up speed. The nation is reeling under an unsustainable fiscal morass – a national debt of $18 trillion; unfunded obligations that the National Center for Policy Analysis estimates total another $84 trillion for programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; and continuing annual budget deficits that hover between “only” $500 billion and over $1.2 trillion. We are stealing from our young, because every child born today inherits almost $50,000 in debt, and the average family is $107,060 in debt.
Smothering regulation and geometric proliferation of laws. The U.S. is drowning in laws. More and more laws create complexity, inequitability, expense, disarray and unintended consequences. Too many new laws amount to tax-like regulations that create economic decline. Regulators will always find new rules and new fines to justify their existence, whether they’re needed or not. This dangerous practice makes them looters, but with the added power to punish the places they’re looting. The annual regulatory cost to Americans now exceeds $2 trillion, which is 12 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
American progressivism, the new name for socialism, that expands the government’s role to nanny-state proportions. The progressives seek wealth redistribution and equality at the finish line, not equality at the starting line, where it should really apply.
Incompetence of the leadership class. The public trust and faith in politicians is now at historic lows. The American leadership class sees itself as divorced from, and superior to, the general population. The men and women at the helm of power stick together and often protect one another. Too many leaders blame “the market” for economic and societal failures, so they can impose more government on the nation to “fix it.” The leadership class thrives thanks to a compliant media that helps incumbent politicians get re-elected. The result: The leadership class in America and its mainstream media partners fail to keep citizens informed about the true, growing dangers we all face. Our leadership class as a whole has failed this country, and nowhere has national leadership failed more miserably than in the black community.
If most of these dangers are not mitigated or eliminated, we will have sounded the death knell for the America that older generations knew, and the deterioration of the American way of solving problems. Our youth will have been sold down the river. America cannot take endless abuse.