Why The U.S. Economy Is Not Recovering

20 million people unemployed, underemployed or no longer counted because they have been unemployed too long. Falling home prices with no bottom in sight and foreclosures and notices of default mounting, as half of all home sales are now foreclosures or short sales in which owners lose their equity and lenders forgive some of the mortgage amount.

This is today's American economy. Add to that young people also having trouble finding jobs including recent college graduates. And many people are defaulting on their credit cards, student loans and other financing. This is not what economists and pundits predicted. Why is this happening? What's gone wrong? The answer is simple:

1) We are now a military industrial economy. Coast to coast we produce weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, including jet fighters, and for the 1st time in our history, we are now fighting perpetual wars. Before World War ll, we had about 14 military bases and today we have well over a thousand all over the world. We spend as much on our military as the rest of the planet combined spends on theirs, and all of what we spend is at taxpayers expense. It is draining the life out of our economy.

2) Including its military expenses, and its refusal to tax the people to pay for it, the U.S. brings in only 59 cents for every dollar it spends. This in itself is a formula for financial disaster.

3) Our finances are so dire, we are willing to slash our Medicare, Medicaid, Educational System (our children's future) and Social Security (whose funds are now mostly a government IOU) and police and fire protection in order to support our military industrial complex. Why? Because they are a massive source of jobs. "Defense" is the one part of our economy that is booming.

4) Wall Street and the stock markets are doing well because giant companies have shipped much of their manufacturing overseas and their profits are up. And stocks trade on profits, not on American jobs.

5) Speaking of being up, gas prices are up as are food prices, clothing prices, doctor and hospital prices, college tuition and the cost of most everything else, as inflation is beginning to take hold. This is a result of the Fed's stimulus plans in which they print and circulate large sums of money in the vain hope we can spend our way out of this mess.

No my friend, we cannot solve a debt crisis by spending our way out of it. We will have to confront our problems and solve them, starting with ending our three wars. Then we must slash our military spending, which will bring hardship but hardship is coming anyway as we are going broke. Clearly the two political party monopoly under the control of lobbyists is failing us and it is long past time we Americans raised our voices and got involved. This was a great nation and it can be great again. We must restore it for ourselves, for our children and for the world.

Dick