I think that it is about time to talk a little politics here. It seems like this world of ours is on a downturn. The HAVES are having more and the HAVE NOTS are getting less. This is even true in this great country of ours. You constantly hear how there are more people employed now than ever before, but you never hear about the quality of those jobs, or more importantly, the standard of living. It is a very sad thing when you see your children, even those with a good college education, doing worse than you did without such a comprehensive education. Oh I am not talking about myself here, but of people in the U.S. in general. Don't believe it when you are told that sending computer jobs overseas doesn't effect the economy. It may be great for companies that always thrive on cheap labor but it is a disaster for programmers and computer science majors, yet we hear that they are not only not effected, but have better jobs than ever, how can this be? I think that we have to use our brains here folks, both things can't be true. If you send one high paying job out of the country then we have one less high paying job, it is just common sense no matter what twist is put on it.

Are you tired of seeing gasoline prices soaring? Have you wondered why our government has done nothing to break up this monopoly? I know that I am. Games are being played at the expense of the American people. No mention is ever made of the millions upon millions of people on the east coast of the U.S. that have oil heat. I bet most of you didn't know that they are paying the same price per gallon of oil that you pay for regular grade gas and there is no relief for any of them in sight. The government is conveniently ignoring this fact. Because of this fact, there may be a crash in the housing market in these areas. Yes these people could switch to natural gas in some areas, but that is just as expensive. There is this shell game going on. On one hand we are told sometimes that there is a shortage of oil because of the Iraq war, terrorism and China and India becoming more industrialized so prices have to go up. So what happens then? The president either releases oil from the reserve or doesn't put in the usual two million gallons that month. Then we are told that there is too much oil and we don't have enough refineries to handle it so prices have to go up. We have even added bio fuel to some gas but the price still goes up, why? The answer is that oil is going up because futures contracts are bidding the price up and oil companies seem to not be competing with each other on price. The government has known that we could make oil from our enormous coal reserves for years. Knowing this, why are we not filling our strategic oil reserve with oil made from coal instead of taking about two million barrels of oil off the market every month? There is another factor that is keeping the price of oil high, that is manipulation of oil supplies by producing countries. These countries know that their oil supply is not going to last forever so they want to get the most out of what they have left. When the oil is gone, most of these countries will have no way of supporting themselves in the way to which they have become accustomed. Is this another reason we don't want to make oil from coal, are we afraid that if we hurt the oil countries economy it will lead to world chaos?

What about the war in Iraq? Are things any better now than in the past? We had 2390 U.S. military killed as of the first third of 2005. If one compares the U.S. fatalities, by month we have had the following deaths do far this year:
January - 62
February - 55
March - 31
April - 62 (not full month)

If one doesn't count a couple of abnormally high months for deaths such as January 2005, which saw 107 U.S. military die and November 2004 which had a death total of 137, then you would have to say that things are just about the same now as they were for the past several years in Iraq. The U. K. has lost a total of 104 since the war began.

What is the truth on this war, are we winning? Obviously not, we are in some sort of status quo where it looks like the enemy's plan is to bleed us down until the people in the U.S. get so tired of losing their sons and daughters that they will demand the war stop. This is another one of those wars that doesn't seem to have been planned at all. It was like someone said let's get Saddam and then see what happens. Meanwhile we were fed the story that we would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people. Instead of going to war, if we felt so strongly that Saddam should be removed, why didn't we support the people that were trying to over throw him? Was this an oil war or a revenge war? Many of us know that when Bush Sr. was saying things about Saddam, he had threatened to kill Bush. We knew that if we over threw Saddam there would be a void in Iraq and that most likely Iran would try and fill it. Given our current relationship with Iran, I have to say we wouldn't want this to happen. So knowing this, how could we ever leave Iraq? Did we really plan to have a long term force there?

We have talked about U.S. dead but how many U.S. servicemen have been wounded so far in the war? The answer so far is 17,469 as of part of April, 2006. If we were prepared to fight a war in Iraq, why are some of the reserves being sent to Iraq for three and four tours of duty? If anyone is wondering where I got my statistics from, it was http://icasualties.org/oif/.

Next let's look at China. Doesn't it seem to you that we always must have an enemy? Lately all you seem to hear is that we have to be ready in case China starts a war with us. Frankly we should be ready for anyone but it certainly doesn't look like China is getting ready for war, they seem to be more interested in building their economy. If anything, we should be building our economy. If an industry is lost to low wages then we should rebuild it using robotic labor to combat the low wages. This way we could be competitive without hurting the labor force since the industry was lost anyway. The few workers that were left can be taught to maintain the robot machines and maintain the factories. Look at the auto industry. It is said that we are failing because $1500 is added to every car for workers benefits. Is this the truth? It may be, but even if the cars were $1500 cheaper they would have the same problem selling them. The quality is just not equal to some of the foreign cars. There is a certain car brand out there that has an engine in it that fills with sludge and explodes. Websites are dedicated to this problem. You just can't have a problem like this and expect to sell cars. What should happen is this: the government should absorb the workers benefits, they throw so much money away anyway why not save the auto industry. As for the auto industry, they should build a better car with finer tolerances on the parts and more durable designs so that they can become competitive again. When the car sales increase, the taxes generated will help the government recoup some, if not all, of the $1500 per car. I just don't understand why we sit back and let these companies go down the drain? One has to remember that most of these foreign companies are helped by their governments one way or another.

The last thing I would like to discuss is the national debt. It seems to me that we are headed for bankruptcy. There is one thing about this president that can not be denied and that is that he is spending more money than any president in history that is not in a world war. Not only is he spending and spending, he has cut many of the taxes that the richer people pay, thus reducing some sources of income. So how much does this country owe? As of 25 April, 2006 at 05:14:58 PM GMT we owed $8,359,867,283.205.90. The national debt has continued to rise at over two billion dollars per day since September 30, 2005. Scary isn't it? So what have we done about this? On 20 March, 2006, President Bush signed a bill which raised the debt ceiling. Great way to go Mr. President. The new debt ceiling is 9 trillion dollars. Some people are confused between the national debt and the deficit. The deficit is the difference between what the government takes in, in a year and what it spends in that year. The national debt is the total that the government owes. Why is it that we don't have a flat tax where everyone pays the same percentage on the total they make? We all know this is the fairest way to pay taxes, yet we cling to this complex system which is frightfully unfair with some very wealthily people paying relatively nothing while the middle class shoulders the burden. U.S. citizens have some of the smallest saving per capita while they are forced to use credit cards and many have a very high credit card balance. Isn't it about time that this country straightens out it's finances. If we ran our homes the way the government runs the country, we would land up living in the street.

Statistics on National Debt provided by http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/.