Our economy has seen the closure of thousands of factories and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs over the past four to five decades. The strategy of globalization is that we will import consumer goods and become a service society. And the “affordability” problem we are facing now is just the tip of an iceberg we choose to ignore.

The problem with this strategy is we end up buying more than we sell as a nation, resulting in the trade deficits that have existed for decades. The way our government buffers the loss of these jobs is to spend trillions of dollars building weapons and infrastructure with borrowed money. If today’s taxpayers had to pay out of their pockets for this spending, it would stop in the next election cycle.

The state of our union is that we have $39 trillion of debt at the beginning of this year and will have $41 trillion by the end of the year. Every household will pay an average of $7,000 on just the interest on the debt. Social Security funding falls short in eight years and there is no way that a government that is wallowing in debt will have the resources to bail out the social safety net.

But like all decisions that seem to be made in the USA, unless it affects the voters today, there is no reason to look to the horizon. When the sun sets on Social Security, anarchy will be the reality.

Tom Turner
Augusta