Friday, January 19, 2018

American Spending

Americans spend a lot of their money on necessary things that now cost a lot more than anybody ever thought they would.  We are all stuck with a home mortgage or rent bill and basic utility bills for electric, natural gas, water, telephone and property taxes. These bills have always been with us, but now they cost 10 times more than they used to cost.

 

Most of us have automobiles and we are required to have automobile insurance and immediately replace burned out front and rear lights or we get fined. 

 

Many of us have televisions and internet and are billed for these. We also have cell phones that act as cameras, video recorders, internet connectivity and lots more, but they cost more than land lines.

 

We now spend lots of money on unnecessary things we used to do without. We used to get our pets free from neighbors or animal shelters and these mutts never got sick, but now we pay big bucks to buy them at pet stores.  Pets used to be healthier, but now we can rack up lots of veterinarian bills.  We used to play ball in vacant lots, but now we sign up for sports teams with uniforms and coaches and play at expensive tax funded sports complexes. We used to have swing sets in our back yards, but now we go to expensive tax funded parks. We used to have blow-up plastic pools and games in the back yard, but now we go to the subdivision pool and tennis courts. We used to celebrate birthdays at home with a birthday cake we baked. Now we buy the cake and rent a blow-up slide or go to a “party facility”.

 

We used to cut our own grass and apply our own fertilizer and water it with a hose, but now we hire out the yard work and have an in-ground automatic sprinkler system. We used to do our own home maintenance and painting, but now we hire contractors. We used to maintain our own automobiles, but now they are too complicated to work on.

 

I used to go to schools where the buildings were over 100 to 200 years old, but the buildings were well maintained and upgraded and the education was much better and much cheaper. I used to ride my bike everywhere, but today moms don’t want their kids to be out of their sight.  I got to work my way through school, pay my own expenses and had no student loans, but those days are past.

 

We have tried to survive on the “service economy” we were left with after we exported our manufacturing jobs to other countries and imported welfare refugees to take whatever jobs that were left. The cost of our socialist policies has soared and our wages have stagnated and we are now just like Europe.  It’s time to increase our productivity to dig our way out of this hole.

 

Today, consumer debt in the US is now $12.7 trillion.  US government debt is over $20 trillion with unfunded liabilities of $124 trillion. Our situation in the US is similar to the economic decline we saw in Europe after the expenses they paid to rebuild after World War I and World War II and were losing their colonial holdings. The Trump agenda is the key to restoring our economy. We also need to tighten up and pay down our debts.

 


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

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