What is going on in the U.S.? We used to be the greatest country in the world and that was due to our extremely strong economy. Why are we beginning to suffer and is there any hope that we will be able to get out of this mess without the entire country going down the tubes? The reasons that the economy is getting so bad can be explained, believe it or not. Before I get into that, the rest of the question is much harder to answer. It just might be that we have dug ourselves a hole so deep that we will not be able to get out of it and things will just keep getting worse, until we have a complete economic failure. No one would have believed that this was possible ten years ago, but here we are on the verge of economic disaster. First I want to make it quite clear that I am not an economist, I am just an average guy who has a few years under his belt and has seen both good times and bad. To be quite frank, I can not remember when things were ever as bad as they are now. I was not alive during the great depression, but I concede that it was worse, but we haven't hit bottom yet either and who knows what it will be like when that happens?

The Pentagon has been spending huge amounts of money for many years now. It seems that most of the politicians are afraid to try and cut the waste, they don't want to be called unamerican, they also don't want to kill the golden goose that provides contracts to companies in their districts and states. These same companies are flying them all over in private planes and giving them various other perks that we seldom hear about. The lobbyists for these companies are spreading money around capital hill like it was paper and everyone there wants a piece of the pie. This was bad enough for all those years, but under the Bush administration they have gotten the green light, the sky is the limit. Even companies that have been caught overcharging have only been slapped on the wrist and still allowed to conduct business with the government. I am not talking about slight overcharges, I am talking about overcharges in the billions of dollars. You would think that some agency would be trying to cut down the waste and fraud. The GAO or Government Accountability Office, is an agency that was charged with this duty. The agency was established by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. This Act required the head of GAO to "investigate, at the seat of government or elsewhere, all matters relating to the receipt, disbursement, and application of public funds, and shall make to the President...and to Congress...reports and recommendations looking to greater economy, or efficiency in public expenditures." The agency is supposed to be non-partisan, but you can imagine the pressure they are under from senators, representatives and White House staff, to leave certain companies alone. In all fairness they have come up with a few large overcharges against companies and that is where that slap on the wrist that I talked about, came up.

We are maintaining the most expensive military that the world has ever seen. The cost of some of our weapons has gone so high that we have to ask ourselves why we are even building them. I am not saying that we should leave ourselves unprotected, that would be crazy. What I am asking is why are we building bigger and bigger aircraft carriers, when hardly anyone else has any? Would it make more sense to upgrade the ones we have? The carrier Ronald Reagan begun construction in the 1990s and was estimated to cost two billion dollars. When the contractors got done with it, the cost shot up to more than double and ended up being about four billion three hundred million dollars. Why do all these contracts usually come it at far more than the estimates? Are we being taken advantage of, what do you think? Over twenty three billion dollars was spent secretly to develop the B-2 bomber and this was over fifteen years ago. The program cost kept going up, a billion here, a billion there. It got so expensive that the original 132 aircraft, that we were going to order were reduced to 20. Does something seem wrong here to you, it does to me? The cost of the new Joint Strike Force fighter plane has risen to almost one hundred million each and the reduction in amounts game is being played again. How can any country continue to purchase weapons in quantity at these prices? Don't even get me started on submarines.

The war in Iraq is costing over five thousand dollars per second. three hundred thousand per minute and eighteen million dollars per hour. Then there is the war in Afghanistan and the cost of troops based in Japan and in several other countries around the world and the bases that are being used. What has the response been from the military in these hard fiscal times? The have requested the largest military budget in the history of the country. They have asked for five hundred and fifteen billion dollars in discretionary spending and have said that they need this extra amount for the cost of the war. Let me remind all of you out there, that the reason we went to war was said to be that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which was not true. What this means is that our economy is being ruined because we are fighting a war that we shouldn't have been in, in the first place. As we put more troops in Iraq and put more pressure on the insurgents, they are increasing the pressure on Afghanistan. Will Afghanistan become the next Iraq and become a place that will just suck up hundreds of billions of dollars of our money? Could be, if we allow this to happen. Contractors have used these countries as a great excuse to build sub par buildings and works and charge us incredibly high prices for their work. Some of the buildings in question have actually had roofs fall in and such, even before they were able to be occupied and we allowed these contractors to get away with this. What is wrong with our leaders, are they so greedy that they just don't care what is happening, as long as they get a piece of the pie?

One of the major things effecting our economy is the price of oil. I know that this is no surprise to anyone. First of all, I want you to know this about imported oil. I will use the years 1996 to 2000 as an illustration of where the oil profits are going. Taxes on foreign oil for those years were about one trillion, three hundred million dollars. Revenues to the oil producing nations was less. It was eight hundred and fifty billion dollars. Right off the bat, you can see that the countries importing oil are making far more money off of it, than the producing countries. According to the published figures, the companies for this period made about one third the total price per gallon in the U.S. In places like Japan they made far more. In places like europe the bulk of the price for gasoline is tax. It showed up as far more than you would expect. It was sixty to seventy percent of the product. The oil companies would love to get prices in the U.S. up to European prices, because this would provide them with the biggest profits of anywhere, since the taxes are lower here. The question is, why is this being allowed to happen? We have had the means to produce gasoline from coal ever since gas rose above one dollar and thirty nine cents a gallon. If some of this was produced by the government and put into the market place it would help to drive down prices and who knows, maybe things would get back to normal. Remember these figures I cited end in the year 2000 and they come from OPEC. The most recent fiscal statement for Exxon showed that they made 11.66 billion dollars in a quarter, shattering all records for revenues by a U.S. company. That works out to over 45 billion per year folks. Last year they earned over 40 billion dollars. One had to only add up all the sales by all the oil companies in this country to realize that money is being sucked out of our collective wallets at a phenomenal rate and nothing is being done about it. Where is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?

Watching the oil companies and the government play this game has inspired others to try and get in on the huge windfalls. Look at the dairy farmers who have raised the price of milk to about that of gasoline. Eggs, which were once very cheap have risen drastically in price as have grain and other foods. When food prices are raised, this is bad enough, but then we also have increased costs, because of the price of oil. Oil is used to make plastic, so containers go up in price. It is used to heat some buildings, so the overhead goes up and it is used in transporting the items to the store and as prices for fuel go up, it has to be passed along to the store and then to you and I. Did you know that it now costs the average big rig driver over eleven hundred dollars to fill his truck with diesel fuel? Can you imagine that? We can't expect this poor guy to eat costs like that.

Before the oil companies began their rampage, the medical companies had already begun to raise their costs tremendously. As a matter of fact, many blame them for inspiring the oil companies, who were watching and noticed that nothing was being done to discourage them. Medical costs have skyrocketed. We are becoming a country with a large uninsured population. These companies have told us that it is expensive to develop new drugs and indeed it is, but it is no where as expensive as they would lead you to believe. The drug companies have been giving all sorts of things away to doctors and pharmacists to get them to use their products. If the drug companies were telling us the truth, the price for the same drugs that we use here, would not be less in other countries. Another thing, pills that are sold to farmers for livestock, that are sold for a few cents, that are basically the same as some of the pills we take that cost us far more, wouldn't exist. Now the medical insurance industry is trying to get in on the gravy. They have a plan to try and get all the insured to have to pay one third of the cost of drugs and they have implemented it in a small test area. Everyone is getting greedy and this is what is killing our economy.

Add to this the true unemployment rate, not the five percent or so claimed and you can see the storm brewing. Will greed by companies, the military and others and inactivity by the government, bring this country down? It could happen. Let's hope that somewhere along the line, we get some responsible leadership and that they will take the actions necessary.