Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Who should we trust now?

I have been spending some time this week reading over the influx of articles detailing the potential shutdown of our government and I can't help but draw connections to some themes we saw in this movie in class. I am certainly not the first person to make a comparison between our government and a large corporation and right now I am feeling like we need new management. We stand on the precipice of having a severely hindered government and I can't think of a time we would be more vulnerable. The entire issue that is causing us to face this possibility is... you guessed it, money. We have both of our parties blaming eachother that their spending habits are irresponsible and in the end the people that suffer from this most is us. As I read about this whole situation I start to get a bit frustrated with each of these parties we have elected to avoid this type of situation and then I remember that I, just like everyone else in the country of voting age, can't get mad at these people. We really can only blame ourselves for putting these representatives in a place where they can make the act of creating a budget for our government a political spectacle. All the while as I read about all the name-calling and political maneuvering, I find myself reminded of the management of the companies we saw in the movie like Lehman Bros. I really worry about the future of the nation and certainly the shape of our economy when we would allow our government to pull a stunt like this when we are just barely starting to pull out of this recession we have been in for so long. It seems similar to me like we are basically being kicked while we are down. We have the potential to lose billions of dollars both in national deficit and as lost wages for all the government workers that may find themselves on an unwanted furlough. And of course lost wages translate to lost money in our economy. We have got to start electing more fiscally responsible representatives or I fear this recession has only just begun.