Making bad decisions over time results in pain. If you marry the wrong person you will endure a painful divorce or a bleak life. If you disdain education, you may face fewer good job choices. If you abuse substances you may lose your driving privileges or worse. Bad choices spell pain. The more you make, the more pain you will face.
Our leaders have been making bad decisions for a long time. First, we believe we will always be the World Leader. We feel we are entitled. People today who are making bad decisions had nothing to do with making us the World Leader. But they can have a lot to do with making it worse. They have two paths to take. One, a path of vision that corrects past errors and leads the way to making us stronger. Or, a path that weakens us and causes us to lose our edge and our spot at the top.
In business, you see company after company make the wrong decisions and go down the wrong path. There is a long list of well-known companies in the country that no longer exist. American Motors, Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Arthur Anderson,and Enron,just to name a few.
Public confidence in this country is at a low. Citizens, you and I, know we are on a bad path. We are feeling the pain. Have we made bad decisions that will make us a second rate nation? Two out of five Americans believe we have. In a recent poll that’s the percentage of Americans who believe China will overtake us as the World Power in five years or less.
What are the bad decisions that have caused us to feel we are the road to pain? As the richest nation in the world, we believe we have endless spending limits. We can give money to foreign countries, we can fund a space program with no tangible goals, we can fight a war that may result in no gain and big losses for all. We can put all of our attention on a goal that may have no benefit–global warming, because a former vice-president wrote a paper on it as a student at Harvard, and a majority of the media, most Democrats, all of Hollywood, and few misguided Republicans have bought into the myth.
What does all of this add up to? We have stopped making things in America. Manufacturing is at an all time low. We have stepped up spending money we don’t have. We are shipping dollars out of the country at a record rate. Between the war and the price of oil we import, we are destroying the value of our currency.
We want to be the world’s buyer of products made elsewhere. To finance this we have a investment economy. As the mortgage mess showed us some of the basis for this investment is not sound. As the dollar falls, other countries that have been investing in US companies are backing away. They smell pending trouble with our house of cards investment economy.
We ask the rest of the world to supply us cheap energy by doing what we refuse to do here. Is that the epitome of arrogance or the symptom of ignorance? Either way, other countries are on to us and we can count on less and less help with our future energy needs. Plus, we will have to use more and more deflated dollars to buy what scraps we get.
We are going to have pain. Lot’s of pain. Until we personally decide we need leaders who make better decisions we will suffer. Even after we clean house, we will suffer until new leaders can fix the damage. It will not start for at least 5 years since we have no one running for president who will fix it. Most of congress will not. There will be lots and lots of pain and you might as well prepare yourself to endure it since we can’t change it. Time to teach your kids and grandkids to live a leaner meaner lifestyle. Sorry, but the die was cast a long time ago. Bad decision piled on bad decision equals pain. l
