Has the pursuit of the American Dream gone too far? For the current generation it seems the American Dream has become the pursuit of material prosperity. People are working more hours to purchase larger homes, expensive cars, and many other material possessions to please themselves and their families.
Americans feel like nothing can stop them from buying everything they believe they deserve, even if they don’t have the money to pay for it. When the cash runs out, credit cards are there to save the day! Credit and loans may save the day, but at the end of the week they are destroying the country. You can only live on credit for so long. In time, it has to come crashing down.
Our economy has been driven by greed and selfishness for so long and, contrary to what we think, it can’t last forever. People have bought houses, cars, computers, clothes, and too many more items to list on credit many times knowing they are not going to be able to pay for it. It’s amusing that people call the effects they have purchased on credit their own when clearly they don’t own them if they haven’t paid for them. Banks continue lending out money and seemed surprised when they don’t get it back. People should learn to balance their checkbooks and spend with limits.
The outcome of this credit driven society is the current financial problem the country is facing. AIG recently declared bankruptcy. The stock market faced its largest drop in a one day period this week losing 777 points and Wall Street remains unstable. Instead of accepting the consequences of our actions, our answer is to ask the government for help. Which, by the way, is an awesome idea since the government is sitting on approximately 10 trillion dollars worth of debt itself.
The government’s answer to our problems: let's use money we don’t have to bail out people who are in trouble because they used money they didn’t have, and we will call it a bailout, a $700 billion bailout. According to a current News 9 poll, 62 percent of Oklahomans are against the bailout plan. I have to agree with them.
What is sad is how the government can automatically magically come up with $700 billion dollars to bail out these multimillion dollar companies which have gotten themselves into their own problems. Yet the government can’t come up with $700 billion dollars to feed starving children in our own country and help pay health care for sick families.
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Article comments
1 - DaveNalle
Hey, I've got an idea. Let's get some torches, march down to the homes of these selfish people, light their homes on fire and then fall on them and beat them to death when they come running out.
Dave
2 - Cindy D
Nah, we don't have to beat them. We can just burn their houses down and the merely blame them. Sensible people should know better than to live in anything but a fireproof fortress.
3 - Joanne Huspek
I have to agree with you, Sara. Our (meaning the US, not ME) selfishness has led us down this path of self-destruction. As much as I don't want to see my retirement go up in smoke, I'm leaning heavily toward letting the chips fall where they fall. It's all a moot point since the bail out sailed through Congress. Even with the money, there is no guarantee we won't face calamity in the future.
And now, everyone will have their hand out. You're right, though. Small business won't get a piece of the pie. People who did the right thing and were financially responsible won't get a bail out package either.
4 - bliffle
The Bailout reveals a horrible deceit in American life: that an exploitive economic system is justified by Survival Of The Fittest. We have now decided that certain unfit people (their unfitness proven be their utter failure to operate the financial business well) must nevertheless survive and prosper by a trillion dollar contribution extracted from the rest of us.
This is such an extraordinary refutation of a basic principle of our society that I am only amazed that so few seem to notice or care about it.
We are embarking on a new course in US political life: the powerful may use whatever instrument they find necessary to exploit the less powerful.
The pretense of Free Markets is destroyed.
Only power matters.
We are moving toward feudalism. And we are moving so fast that it may be within our lifetimes that we see people impressed into involuntary servitude: i.e., slavery.