Boy, oh boy, does the world seem to be headed in the wrong direction. We’ve got riots in Great Britain, two wars we can’t seem to find our way out of, and an economy that looks like it’s permanently unemployed. Now, on top of it all, we have our President driving around in two publicly paid buses at $1.1 million each, so he can talk to people for three whole days on how we have to cut government spending. What an absolute atrocity and a spit in the face of people who are struggling to put food on their tables. By the way, the cost for the buses doesn’t include gas.

Locally, we’ve got a knife being held to our liberties if you’re homeless and, of course, having nothing to do with liberties, but definitely taking advantage of tax payers, we have the Anchorage school district that just got extra money to hire 20 teachers at an average of $92,000 each. That one I’m not surprised at.

What is going on? People I talk with feel, deep down, that things just aren’t looking good. I met a woman who said she won’t have a child in this type of world. That’s pretty sad but I can understand her thinking.

Remember the 90s when Clinton was President? The stock market went through the roof, everybody had a job, and we had a surplus of cash – not a deficit. The United States had $600 million in the bank, and we weren’t involved in any long-term wars. I even got to go to a Christmas party that my girlfriend’s company threw for a $150 a person in Times Square. It was like the roaring 20s all over again. Things were great.

Every empire falls, every economy collapses, every peaceful nation has wars, and every persons liberties may fall to those in power. It’s just the nature of things. In time, how long we never know, everything will swing back.

My question is: why don’t we do a little more predicting than waiting? It seems that we always know what lies around the corner, yet we just walk into it without any hesitation.

We see unemployment becoming a huge problem, but we don’t really address it; we see homeless veterans starving, yet we make a law punishing people for giving them money; and we see soldiers coming home with post traumatic stress syndrome and limbs missing yet we cut their benefits. I don’t understand why we have this “beggars of own demise” attitude.

The United States had its credit rating brought down from AAA status to AA plus by Standard & Poor’s. That’s pretty sad. Canada, Germany, France and Great Britain all have AAA status, but not the United States. It’s the first time since 1941 that has ever occurred. Standard & Poor’s is a financial services company that publishes research and analysis on stocks and bonds. It’s also one of the big three credit rating agencies along with Moody’s and Fitch Ratings. When the S & P downgraded the U.S. credit rating, it was like the economy going from nervous to a full blown anxiety attack, and it will definitely affect the entire world for some time to come.

When I was in college, we used to drive over the border into Canada. We almost got a $1.40 Canadian for every U.S. dollar. It was a lot of fun to say the least. Today one U.S. dollar gets you 99 cents in Canadian currency. Wow! One Euro gets you $1.40 in American currency. It used to about even when the Euro came out. Basically, our currency has lost over 40 percent of its value. That’s a big problem for our country.

The United States has become a nation riddled in debt and not being able to do much about it. Some tough decisions have to be made if we want to get out of the $14 trillion dollar credit card bill that we have.

On Aug. 2, the Senate passed a bill, which was signed into law by the President that will cut $2 trillion dollars in debt over the next 10 years. I think we need to cut about $2 trillion in the next two years. After all, the interest on our debt is over a billion dollars every day. Do the math and tell me where the savings is. We paid $395 billion in interest in 2010 and now we’ve decided to cut $200 billion a year. Where’s the savings? Like the author Edward Langley once said, “What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.”

The United States military spent $685 billion in 2010 and today it’s $707 billion. We have over 1,445,000 people in the military. Since 2001, we’ve spent over $1.2 trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan alone, the United States spends $250 million dollars per day or approximately $180,000 per minute. We should have much more control over our military budget, but we don’t. And here’s why: The military has utilized something called “Discretionary Spending” for some time now. It allows government planners, as they’re called, to have more flexibility in spending. Otherwise, the government wouldn’t be allowed to spend so much due to constitutional limitations. Basically, “Discretionary Spending” allows the government to bypass the law and spend more. This type of spending made up 50 percent of the military budget in 2003 and has gone up from there.

Together, the United States has over 2,650,000 federal workers. Let’s face, it most government jobs are kind of cushy. Anyone who has a friend who works for a government agency can testify to that. Sorry, but it’s the truth. You can leave on Wednesday and tell everyone to have a nice weekend and still be employed. I should have skipped out on college and worked for the U.S. Post Office. I could have retired by now with a nice pension and benefits.

The bottom line is this: if you want to fix the economy you have to cut government spending. There are all sorts of areas you could start with, but we need to start by getting out of two useless wars we’re battling and then taking an ax to the fat of all other Federal agencies.

If we don’t do something soon, the U.S. currency will not only continue to look more and more like money in the game Monopoly, but be about as valuable.