The USA is a country with a great potential to be a positive leader and a peaceful superpower in the world. However, despite this fact, there has been a steady decline in the US economy, which is lost on many. The country’s ongoing military campaigns that began in 2001, its fight with terrorist organizations, the arms and ammunition it has been supplying to its allies to support its goals, all have severely hurt the US economy, which had already been struggling with recession since 2007. Although US diplomats are doing everything in their power to conceal this truth with foreign policy tricks, the statistics paint a grim picture.
One of the greatest problems of the USA is its trade deficit. Every 1 billion dollars of trade deficit within the borders of the USA is costing 9,000 jobs. The deficit is growing by the day as the country harms her relations with her allies due to foreign policy choices, as she makes entry/exits to and from the country almost impossible and as it, albeit indirectly, denies its citizens their rights to move freely especially in the Middle East.
According to a study conducted in 2012, 14% of households in the USA are food insecure. Again, the figures of 2012 show that 46.5 million people in the USA are living below the poverty line, and 20.4 million people are living in extreme poverty. According to a report by The National Center on Family Homelessness [NCFH], the number of homeless children in the USA is also on the rise. 2.5 million American kids are living on the streets and this number keeps going up. Also this year, the US economy has shrunk by the most in five years.
Safety is the first thing entrepreneurs take into consideration while making an investment in a country. The USA takes harsh measures to ensure safety, but after a while, these harsh measures begin to threaten the safety of investors. In addition, they also prevent the investors from making plans for the future and keep them from feeling safe within the borders of the USA. Consequently security factor would thus be weakened for foreign investors. All this ultimately prevents new investments.
Furthermore, the stern and erroneous foreign policies of the USA impair the image of the whole country in the international arena. Due to the various interventions and military campaigns in the Middle East, Far East and South America based on the decisions of a few war-mongers who opt for violence to solve problems and who have not even a shred of compassion, the peoples of those regions have turned against the USA. For this reason, US nationals and soldiers no longer feel safe to travel to other countries, even those that are the allies of the US. And this anti-American sentiment is severely impairing the partnerships of US businesses, their investments and business in general. US foreign policy thus has a detrimental effect on its economy both in and outside USA.
Furthermore, the fact that the USA is bound to allocate all its investments to the defense industry, is another destructive force for the economy. The costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars exceed six trillion dollars, which means that 75,000 dollars per household in USA is spent for wars. Add to this, the current war of the US against ISIS, the cost of foreign operations climb up to $312,500 per hour. Had this money been spent for education, health care, employment and social aid, the economic growth would have picked up great speed.
To achieve the desired economic growth, US officials should stop making their economy defense-industry oriented and use the resources to reconstruct the country and on education to eliminate the security problems that threaten the USA. If the USA spends only a small amount of the money it has been spending for wars since 2001 for a world-wide education campaign that would eliminate the intellectual substructure of terrorist and radical ideologies, the US economy would have developed and the risk of reoccurrence of such a recession in the long-term would have been eliminated. For these reasons, it is clearly seen that the USA can solve its domestic and foreign problems only with a language of reconciliation and love.
Adnan Oktar's piece on Urdu Times & News Rescue:
http://newsrescue.com/usa-spend-education-overcome-recession/#axzz3LKqReRJK
