Washington, DC - "It took the Soviet Union nearly 75 years to prove that Communism doesn't work; it's taken the United States only six years to demonstrate that Socialism is a failed political system as well," according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Weber said "the kind of Capitalism the founding fathers adopted from the outset made the United States economy the strongest, most powerful force for progress that the world has ever seen over the past hundred and fifty years. But we relinquished the title of World's Top Economy to China last week. It was the inevitable consequence of progressive experiments, ironically paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese."
He explained that over the past six years our National Debt has skyrocketed to more than $18 trillion. "President Obama famously declared it was irresponsible for previous administrations to have amassed a debt of $10.6 trillion. Yet, since he took office nearly $8 trillion has been added to the National Debt and we're still counting."
From the outset, Weber said, the president has "put our money into social welfare schemes, the most prominent and costly of which is Obamacare. But, he also placed billion-dollar bets on a variety of questionable green energy projects, including solar power projects that quickly went bankrupt. We needed good paying full-time jobs to overcome the Great Recession but he gave us low-paying part-time jobs. We needed energy self-sufficiency, but he used regulations to make it harder to recover our vast land-based and sea-based petroleum resources."
The private sector has shown the way for America to become energy-independent, he said. "In fact, the current precipitous drop in gasoline prices is, to a large extent, due to the success of private resource recovery projects that have significantly increased home grown oil and gas production. We have become the world's number one natural gas producer and though we do not yet produce enough oil to make us the number one petroleum producer, we are getting closer to that goal. We're close enough that OPEC and Russia have slashed oil prices in hopes of slowing us down."
Gallup shows that home ownership among the middle-class has dropped 11% since 2007, from 73% to 62%. Unemployment is down, but the number of people relying on one or two part-time jobs to make ends meet is up sharply and the number of people who have dropped out of the workforce entirely is at record highs. And, average households that earned $49,000 four years ago are now making do with about $46,700, according to government statistics.
"Those are facts, untainted by political bias," Weber stated. "But there is another fact that overshadows all the others. If the new Congress does not get its act together quickly when it sits for the first time next month and make a concerted effort to turn us away from the misguided socialist experimentation of the past several years, the nation will continue to suffer for generations to come. Republicans and Democrats, including President Obama, will need to cooperate with each other for change to take place or the nation's economy and its security will continue to deteriorate."
