Everyone is happy now that we have a vaccine for the coronavirus. This vaccine will reduce the number of deaths occurring in our country over the next few months and ease the burden on our healthcare system. Unfortunately, even after the coronavirus is under control we will remain in a slow economy with unemployment remaining high for years, according to the Fed.
To keep us from going into a depression the government had to spend trillions of dollars providing support to individuals and companies to keep them afloat. This was necessary because it helped us to avoid another Great Depression. And luckily, as with all recessions we will eventually recover.
Except this time, we have an 800 pound guerilla sitting in the corner which not too many people are talking about right now. That guerilla is just sitting there waiting his turn because the pandemic guerilla and the recession guerilla are presently on stage. That 800 pound guerilla is our national debt. And we won’t even bring up our state and local debts for the time being.
I just checked the national debt counter on the Peterson Foundation website and we are up to $27,385,710,439,000 and counting, which is equal to $82,853 for every person in America. And the speed at which the number on the counter is increasing is shocking. On top of that, the government may have to shell out another trillion for more stimulus.
According to Keynesian economics, we should be spending money and lowering taxes during recessions to help us pull through. But when times are good the same economics model says we should raise taxes, pay off our debt, and save so that we are ready for the next rainy day. Unfortunately, this is not what our Congress has been doing for the past four decades.
Our two-party political system has only proven capable of lowering taxes and increasing spending while our debt has continued to grow. When this pandemic and recession are over, we will likely have a $30 trillion debt at which point we will no longer be able to keep kicking the can down the road. But gridlock will still be there and likely even worse, so nothing can or will get done to start reducing the debt. Scary, isn’t it?
There is, however, one solution that will solve this and all of our other problems. But to implement this solution we have to get over a huge paradigm. We need to realize that having just two major political parties is not normal for a country. The U.S. is one of only a few countries in the world to have a two-party political system and it is destroying us.
The approximately 40% of Americans who are moderates, centrists, or Independents, whatever you want to call us, have little to no representation in government. Moderates make decisions based on facts and science-based logic, we love democracy because democracy is a moderate form of government (our Founding Fathers were moderates), we hate authoritarianism, we are not religious hypocrites, and we believe in the rule of law and the Constitution. We ran our country for over 240 years but we have slowly lost control to those with more extreme ideological beliefs.
We need to push for the formation of a third major centrist tiebreaker party to start making progress in solving our problems such as the debt, to make sure that our democracy is never again threatened, and to do things that make sense. And we need to do it now! Join with others who understand that the problems that we are facing are due to our failing two-party political system.
There are several fledgling efforts out there to accomplish this such as the Alliance Party (theallianceparty.com), the Reform Party (reformparty.org), and Represent.Us. Volunteer and support these organizations – nothing will happen without you. Moderates are not as passionate as those with more extreme ideological beliefs but this needs to change for the sake of all Americans.