Over the next forty years or so we have an unfunded obligation of the federal government that totals around forty four trillion dollars for Social Security and Medicare. That is, if we continue paying taxes at the present rate the Federal budget deficit totals over the next forty years will reach a national debt level of nearly eighty trillion dollars if you count the interest charges on that debt. Now of course there is nowhere to finance that much debt. With an economy growing at less than three percent per year valued at ten trillion dollars per year it would take the whole GDP of the nation just to pay the interest on such a debt. If you fix the interest rate at ten percent that is; of course interest rates would be far higher if we were to try to transfer the cost of retirement to our children in that way.

Jobs are going down, Federal revenues are going down, and costs of the system of retirement we enjoy are going up. This is clearly a funny set of numbers with an unfunny set of consequences for the future. We have long enjoyed the richest economy in the world in the USA. It is hard to comprehend how much richer we are than the rest of the world unless you travel abroad. France's economy is around equal to California's in GDP but the French live in houses older, smaller and far less well equipped than the average Californian's home. Of course there are more French people that there are Californians. It obviously takes more Frenchmen to screw in the same number of light bulbs if that is the measure of how we arrive at the GDP of a nation. And France is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet!

We are exporting jobs fast enough that it is starting to impact the number of jobs available quite seriously, especially middle class jobs. That would be jobs that pay over thirty thousand dollars a year. Now I have no idea how anyone lives on thirty thousand dollars a year any more, much less in a middle class lifestyle but those are the jobs we are losing to the poor of other nations. They don't pay as much in India for a computer geek; that is the point of this exercise. Exporting jobs lowers costs but if they are not replaced it also lowers the pool of people who can afford a computer and the software that is the product. Our nation is the greatest engine of consumption on the planet and jobs fuel that engine, not dividends. It is the middle class worker that spends every nickel they receive that drives our economy, not just the rich coupon clipper.

When we reduce the number of jobs by more than three million and create huge budget deficits that will impact the funds available for creating jobs; we are on the road to Bangladesh without Hope or humor. Of course it will be a long time before most of us in this nation reach the levels of income found in Bangladesh. We may meet somewhere in the middle but it won't be in the middle class range of income! The tragic truth is the whole world needs more jobs that pay middle class wages, but that is not what is happening today. Job creation worldwide is down and likely to drop still further. Concentration of wealth in fewer hands is one of the problems that slows the growth of the international economy and the world-wide movement toward a middle class life. Along with that concentration of wealth in the hands of individuals is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. Corporate power is damaging human lives in more and more ways as this concentration continues. The twenty largest corporations in the world enjoy a GDP close to that of the State of California, one point three trillion dollars. Twenty entities that equal the GDP of a state of thirty five million people, imagine that?
Corporations are not the answer to the question of creating wealth for everyone in the world; in fact they may be inadvertently one of the biggest problems we face in solving the problem of wealth creation. I believe that the wealth of nations can be drained into corporate coffers quite easily where corporations can manipulate the government. Where on earth is that not true today? The answer to the problem at hand is to encourage more entrepreneurs to start small businesses and employ more people. We need more independent individuals offering goods and services outside the Corporate system. There is no magic solution to the destructive exporting of jobs. The government cannot intervene except to stop giving tax credits and deductions for the costs of exporting those jobs. It could also reduce benefits to corporations in industries that export jobs but deny cheaper imports access to our markets. That is as far as government intervention could go and help significantly. We need more micro-loans to help people get started and more private support for entrepreneurs willing to take the risk and make the effort involved. The evolution of this economy does not need to mean its decline but it will take more effort by all of us to save it under the present conditions.

We need responsible government that does not make promises it cannot fulfill. Medicare does not need to be expanded to cover the costs of drugs. We need to spend less on health care by being better consumers and less afraid of the inevitable death that we all face. We need to face the fact that insurance provided health care systems are failures everywhere in the world and we need to understand the economic limits of government supported systems. That is a lot to ask of a population dedicated to ignoring the government whenever it can and criticizing it for failing to provide the good life when they cannot. Social Security will not survive in a world of tax cuts for the taxpaying classes and one where policies raid the surpluses in FICA (Social Security) taxes as they do today. Forty four trillion dollars in unfunded obligations will not be made up by any foreseeable tax increases, we will have to fix the system. One of the fixes possible should be longer working lives to go along with our longer life spans. This will not work if our job creation process continues to lag. Poverty is much harder to tolerate once you have experienced the better life of the middle class in this nation. We need desperately to pursue both private and public policies that create jobs in the private sector to prevent the impoverishment of the middle class. That way lies prosperity, not in the direction of endless deficits and mindless tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

I have hope that the innate drive toward independence in this nation will grow and flourish in the next generation. We need to become far more responsible for our own lives than we are today if our society is to remain the richest and greatest in the world. We need to rein in corporate power where it damages the interests of the people of all classes. Greed and wealth destruction by corporations like ENRON and Adelphia must be punished and the guilty must be made examples of if we are to prosper. Wanton destruction of wealth for personal gain is a horrible crime and needs to be treated as such. The bankruptcy laws favor the corporation without conscience far too greatly. There needs to be a better system devised to protect society from the short-term thinking that leads to huge short-term profits and salaries along with inflated stock prices. The result is far too often disaster like the ones that have become so familiar in the last three years. Finally we need to provide an educational system that allows people of all colors and classes to grow in knowledge and skill and prosper through their own efforts. That is the foundation of our economy and most importantly our Democracy. God bless and keep you all safe and strong in these foolish and greedy times.