A Rant About the G8 Summit

Normally, I would consider myself an optimist. So it’s hard to imagine my lack of trust in our government in terms of fiscal responsibility. Yep, you guessed it. It’s a rant for this post.

In the latest G8 summit, the leaders from the eight most advanced nations in the world: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, discussed economic issues, and Lord knows there are plenty of them to discuss. What with Greece enveloped in protests and our financial industry supposedly in the dumps, it would be surprising to say the least if the G8 didn’t have something interesting to discuss.

But what strikes me as odd about these meetings are all the promises of balancing federal budgets – and that it took a near meltdown of the world economy for them to realize the importance of a balanced budget, it seems.

As I’ve stated in previous blogs, the importance of keeping a balanced budget cannot be stressed enough. Having good financial practices is the way to a good economy. However, our leaders find it necessary to “spend their way” out of recession. That never made a lot of sense to me. We tried that method during the Great Depression, and the only way we got out of it was because of increased demand for industrial products because of WW2, like tanks, guns, and bullets, for example. The government cannot create demand – it can only cause it to rise artificially. In the short term, it looks great, but in the long term, it can be crippling. Look at the government’s Cash for Clunkers program and its recently-unfunded mortgage program.

Simply speaking, the government, along with the other G8 nations, has no intention in balancing the budget anytime soon. They have made their intentions clear: to spend our way out of economic decline; instead we ought to be decreasing taxes on the people that actually create jobs – the business owners and those in the private sector.

In short, the fate of the economy rests with the fiscal responsibility of the family unit and with the individual – we all know we can’t wait for our leaders to get it right.

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Chris Buchheit

Chris Buchheit was born under the hot Floridian sun during some year in the 1980s. There he studied school matters until moving to North Carolina in 1999. Possibly due to the fact that his mom had enough of him being inside all the time, he quickly got involved in community affairs via the Boy Scouts of America, where he learned the values of citizenship, morality, duty to God and country, and that the biggest kids get to boss around the smaller ones. Chris attained the rank of Eagle Scout in 2004, and still values the rank as one of his proudest achievements. Beginning in 2006, Chris began attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he quickly learned the value of basketball and poplar trees. Since attending UNC, Chris has been double majoring in Asian Studies, with a concentration in Chinese, and Political Science. When he isn’t slaving over his honors thesis, looking up a bunch of Chinese Characters, volunteering, or mindlessly browsing the same websites over and over, Chris enjoys writing short stories and novels. Much to his roommates’ annoyance, he also spends his free time learning to play the guitar. Above all else, though, Chris values God, his family, and his friends. For the future, Chris plans to apply to Georgetown to further his studies in Political Science, hopefully with a concentration on China. Pending acceptance into Georgetown, Chris would like to study while gaining professional experience in a government job in Washington DC.

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