My op-ed piece

John O’Brien

English 1A

Wallace

April 29, 2011

Our Depressing Country

            America is facing one of the biggest recessions it has seen since the Great Depression and it is only getting worse.  Some may pose the question of who got us in this mess and how.  The recession is basically caused by all of these big banks and corporations basically trying to make big profits in business without trying to help out the US economy.  All they care about is making money for them and that is it.  Even if it means making poor people suffer and ruining the economy for the now and for the future, as long as they make their profit is all that matters.  All of the outsourcing that these big corporations use to charge these third world countries, who will do anything for money, the smallest amount of money to manufacture their goods is hurting the US economy in so many ways. What they do not realize is if they were not so money greedy and just had everything made in the USA this alone would raise our GDP and help us out of this recession.  

            According to Robert B. Zoellick in Global Issues, Local Arguments, “The economies crisis has already pushed an estimated 100 million people back into poverty”(161).  The banks are now doing things for the political concept rather than for economical reasons.  Banks are always looking to get an extra dollar out of people and they do not care how they do it.  Banks lend out loans to people now with horrible credit history and who come from a low-income background because they know do not have the money to pay them off.  They do this because they are pretty much betting that they will fall behind on payments and will end up paying twice the amount of the original loan all because of backed up interest.  They like to target the audience that they think they can get the most money out of.  But what some of the major banks made a huge mistake on was that giving out loans to people who they knew could not pay them back, well those people didn’t pay them back.  After a while it caught up to them and they ran out of money and went bankrupt.  But the messed up thing about it is that we as the working people who live in the US payed their way out of debt and we did not even know about it. 

            According to Ralph E. Gomory in Global Issues, Local Arguments, “What is good for America’s global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American economy”(179).  When big corporations go to other countries to pay for really cheap labor they are increasing the other countries GDP instead of ours.  From 1973 to now, the GDP has increased as new technologies have been invented the productivity had improved.  But since we are always outsourcing and manufacturing our goods in other countries we, the citizens of the US, are not profiting from this at all because we produce all of our products in other countries.  In Global Issues, Local Arguments, The Bureau of Labor Statistics writes, “Our unemployment rate is up to 9.5 percent as of June 2009”(139).  While this is happening in the USA ,why wouldn’t they just open up factories in the US. It is because they do not care about anybody else but themselves and this is what has caused our recession.  We are losing our jobs and people are not even majoring in technological or engineering as much anymore because there is not many job openings anymore.  Even though if these big corporations would not be making as much profit if they only made products in the US but they would be helping the economy by having the products made here we are not profiting other countries we would be profiting ourselves.  The money that us USA citizens pay for taxes is basically recycled to the economy.  So what do we think we are doing when we are always outsourcing with other countries.

            Will our recession get better before I get out of college and try to find a job?  Will the US finally realize what we are doing to the economy?  Or will the rich and wealthy keep profiting from the lower and middle class?