It's a New Year and a time for new beginnings... Each year we look back and see what we hoped to achieve and how far we have come--both personally and collectively.
2010 began with a painful economic recovery. We were told by official government sources that everything was getting better. Yet unemployment increased, banks closed, foreclosures continued, consumers defaulted and bankruptcies exploded. In the business world, millions of small, medium and big enterprises shut their doors. Credit was restricted and working America struggled to stay afloat.
Where are we now at the start of this new decade? Hopefully we are learning from our past mistakes so we can build a new future.
White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee issued dire forecasts if U.S. borrowing power were curtailed. "This is not a game"If we hit the debt ceiling, that's " essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."
Totally unprecedented in American history... Now that's scary and I imagine the response from the other side will be equally scary. What's not unprecedented is this argument that continues to rage for the two centuries of our history. To debt or not to debt--that is the question and has been the question since our nation began. So let's take a look.
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