I read an article today that talked about some Chinese ships harassing a US boat. Most of the article discussed the tension and various reasons that it shouldn’t have happened and what everyone was doing about it… Whew! What that all seems to have come down to right before the last paragraph is that China is pushing on the US to determine how we’ll respond to their agression.

Then I read the last paragraph and got a little sick about the state of our country. Here’s the clip that I read:

While relations between Beijing and Washington are complex, any sense of military competitiveness is dwarfed by America’s need for China to continue buying US debt to fund its huge and growing deficit

Yikes! Do they mean to suggest that if a military conflict ever came up we would be so committed to keeping our standard of living high and our economy going, that we would prefer to maintain our current levels consumption and inflated economic outlook over maintaining our sovereignty?

It made me wonder how much of our Navy or Air Force they own with their billions of dollars of investment in our national debt. Maybe if the day comes that a military contest becomes necessary, China will just show us deed and title to our military and say “hand it over”

Or, we could stop right now and let our system fall before it recovers. At least then our recovery would have freed us from the oppressive burden of debt that we’ve taken on as consumers and as a country.

Tonight is President Obama’s first presidential address to congress tonight. President Obama is still new in the white house, but he seems a bit hurried and urgent in the things that he’s doing. I’m not sure that such haste creates a good environment for clear thinking and sound judgement. The address will be streamed and so you should be able to watch it here:

I just found this article which highlights some of the issues with rushing to pass and then spend and economic stimulus bill:

Economic Stimulus

Why don’t we slow down a bit.  The article points out that:

“We recall being told last September that if TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was not passed right now, this week, the economy would collapse next week. The economy didn’t collapse (granted it is still weak) and half the money has yet to be spent.”

So, whats the harm in slowing down for a minute and making more educated decisions as we go along our way.

What can we as American’s do to slow this train down?  You could start today by writing to your congressman:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

One of the first life lessons I learned at a very young age was to “slow down”.  I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard that, but it almost always is good advice.  I think it would be excellent advice in light of our current economic crisis.

Sure things are bad, but hurried and poorly planned spending has the potential to make things much worse.  In the first place there had been an excess of consumption on debt.  What a mess it has become.  But why not let the system shrink back down to a sustainable size?

I wish I had more time to say all that I think about it, but one thing I can say for sure is that we need to stop spending, slow down and let the system settle a little bit more.  Once it’s had time to settle into it’s new size there will be a more appropriate time to figure out how we could stimulate parts of the economy.

It’s really hard to watch the way our current government is pushing recklessly forward to spend so much money that it doesn’t have.

Here is a very simple and clear description of proposition 8.