The Price of War - Creditworthiness

The credit market squeeze we've all heard so much about these days is a beast of our own creation, yet most don't realize what's feeding the monster. If you have to spend more than you have in your bank account, then the only way you can do that is to borrow money from someone willing to lend you money.

President Bush decided to commit us to a War on Terror, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in doing so committed us to paying the military-industrial complex over two trillion dollars to pay for the War. Yes, that's trillion with a "t", a thousand billion. Aside from the engineering companies that supported him and Dick Cheney (think Halliburton) and are now laughing all the way to the bank, who else has benefitted the most from this war? Every other country that is buying our debt. The terrorists must be laughing finally, because now we've spent so much money to "eliminate" them that we're essentially borrowing from the rest of the world. We've gone from being the world's largest lender to being the world's largest debtor.

How did we manage to do that you ask? We managed it by being very credit-worthy. Americans pay their debts; we work our asses off to make sure we pay what we owe. Yes, some do file bankruptcy when the weight of debt becomes too much for many valid reasons, but even that alternative has been changed to force more people to pay off at least the principal on what they borrowed. Because of this, the world sees us as the most credit-worthy country in the world, and so they lend us more and more money so our government can blissfully spend more money than it takes in. The net effect is we pay more and more tax dollars just to pay the interest on the debt.

We have now launched a "rescue" of the financial system, setting more than $840 million in funds to purchase assets, which are currently moderately to severely impaired, and to fund tax breaks, some of which were truly needed. The reindexing of the Alternative Minimum Tax ("AMT")threshhold has been needed for a long time, and will actually help homeowners who are actually paying their mortgages in areas with high real estate prices (and mortgages). Because they are no longer subject to AMT, they will no longer have their interest deduction essentially capped due to AMT. So not everything in the rescue plan, formerly known as bailout plan, is bad, it's just troublesome to me that the people who led us to this debacle are in charge of getting us out of it.

In over 30 years in business, I have yet to see a management group recover from almost running their company or project into the ground. Being an ex-Navy man, I'll put it in nautical terms. Bad management teams are like a ship's officers who managed to run the ship aground because they weren't paying attention to the signs there was danger ahead. You would think since they were the ones who made the decisions and took the actions that led them into peril, that they would learn from their mistakes and be able to pull the ship off the rocks. It's been my experience even if they manage to pull off of the rocks, they get the rudder stuck in a port-side turn and crash the ship on the rocks again. They will continue to do so until the company ship is nothing but a skeleton on the reef for the shipworms to devour. Putting the current administration in charge of this rescue plan is tantamount to putting the worst complement of ship's officers in charge of the largest ship ever built.

We need to use our creditworthiness to save our ship and put us back on a safer course, not to fund a war that is breaking us. Our congressional leaders have now committed us to pay to save our credit standing in the world. Let's make sure we actually get something for it; like energy independence, better roads and highways, safer bridges and tunnels and more fuel-efficient vehicles at a reasonable cost. Contact your congressional representatives and tell them you are tired of your money and creditworthiness being wasted on war, and if they don't agree to support your position, vote for somebody who will.

It is time to realize government has a role in our lives and we have to pay for them to perform those functions, so taxes are inevitable. What is not inevitable is wasting those taxes, so please take a stand and support leaders who will try to make sure our money is not wasted.