As an eighteen-year-old, I am faced with a nebulous future after college and grad school. In fact, the only certainty is the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I will accumulate in the course of my education. Even with this education, I cannot be confident a job will be available for me when I leave school. My only consolation is that I have a few years for the job market to improve before venturing into it.
Still, our economic structure has sufficient holes to make me wary of my employment prospects no matter when I graduate. Without a major overhaul of our economic system, the United States is condemned to repeat a boom-and-bust cycle characterized by the dominance of the upper class and Wall Street.
In the corporate world, a lack of regulation leads to a short-term focus that sacrifices long-term economic health. Before the current crisis, a massive deregulation took place in the banking sector, allowing credit to
flow far too freely.
The federal government deserves the blame for allowing this to happen. It began with Reagan, who passed his dangerous legacy of economic deregulation on to Clinton and both Bushes. All the while, Congress stood largely mute.
They now have an opportunity to compensate for their inaction, to remake the system. New regulation is needed, but the economy cannot be looked at in isolation. It is a product, the end result of the investments we choose to make in schools, green technology, infrastructure, healthcare, and more. These are the true fundamentals of our economy; without them, our nation will continue to decline.
Some would argue that massive spending in these areas is impossible, that we, the richest nation on earth, simply cannot afford to care for our citizens. The deficit is far too large as it currently stands, and greater efficiency and accountability in government spending can only do so much. Higher taxes are inevitable-but there are many who can afford to pay. With one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world and an extremely wealthy upper class, the United States has vast reserves of untapped riches.
This wealth is currently not being put to the most effective possible use. Many Americans lack the resources to reach their full potential; if given the means to do so, they would be able to contribute far more to our nation than is currently the case.
The rich will attempt to protect their assets by claiming that they “worked” for that money, and some of them have. But is their work so much more valuable than that of the middle and lower classes, who put forth just as much effort and yet receive less? Eighty percent of the country controls less than twenty percent of our wealth; they deserve far better than what they have. If our economy is to become strong once more, this is where it must grow.
The world has changed; what once sufficed to keep our country strong no longer will. The modern American youth must have a college degree to enter the workforce, yet many of them must take on crushing amounts of debt to pay for their education. Our new working class will be much weaker with this anchor around our
necks, ill-equipped to deal with the challenges we will face. By acting now, we can prevent this.
We have an opportunity to destroy the old model of corporate power, to grow a healthy and educated citizenry that would become the dominant workforce of the twenty-first century. I look at my generation and see apathy and desperation; we can see the system is broken-but I also see our vast potential.
A democracy is only as strong as its people; if the average American is well cared for and educated, then our nation will be far more resilient than before.