Consumption Has No Victims

We consume and no one suffers. That is what we like to believe in America.

We soak up resources and we like to believe there is no consequence of that consumption.  If we were just consuming our own money, that might be true.  But, we are borrowing money from all over the world, distorting the world's resources, to feed our habit.

But, the way it works is this. We consume stuff, others do without stuff because the world trusts us to pay them back.  It is a trust we took centuries to build and yet we are destroying it in Jehovah Bush's two terms. If you are someone that makes a few dollars per day, guess what. Stuff is food. Food for you and your children. We soak up goods, someone else goes without food. At any moment, the amount of goods and services in the world is finite. One person takes from the pool, someone else does without. In the long haul, this is not true. The amount of goods and services being produced is increasing in the world, but at the moment you buy, they are fixed and interchangeable. In other words, your game box equals so man pounds of rice. And the more game boxes you buy, the more money you borrow to buy game boxes, the more the world tries to accommodate your needs and doesn't loan to the poor man to buy food. If the item you buy is a big ticket item, you probably get a disproportionate amount of the world resources dedicated to you at the expense of someone that just wants food.

Combine our high consumption with our throw-it-away almost before it is used philosophy and I believe we have the potential to waste a lot of resources. Couple that with our I don't care what I drive as long as it is big and I can look down on traffic attitude, and I think we can really burn through the resources. Finally, couple that with a military that burns through money like there is no bottom, and I think we become a sink hole of waste. With our past opulence, that was no sweat. But, that was a generation ago when we were far ahead of everyone, working hard, saving and educating our population. We do none of that well any more and our competition is not sleeping. The housing crisis are some of the roosters coming home to roost.  We are now a poor country.  Wake up America and stop living in the past.

It is still not too late to change our ways. It is a marathon and we out in front at the ten mile pole, however, the race is long and have others tucked in behind us riding in our wake, ready to pass us later in the race. As a first step, we need to review our value system.  We need to pay our debts as individuals and as a country.  Forget the tax cuts.  We need to pay double taxes for ten years to just begin to shrink our debt.  And both parties are still fighting to promise us what we want, less taxes.  We deserve what we get.