Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Current Issues Project
By the end of your research, you will (or should) know more about your topic than the vast majority of Americans. Here is your chance to share important and or interesting things you learn in your research. What is the problem? Is it really a problem? Why is it so hard to fix? Etc.
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Immigration is a huge topic that causes a lot of controversy in our country. Most people in the US believe that immigration is an insanely horrible thing that needs to be put to a halting stop. Some things with immigrants DO cause problems, like bringing drugs and crime into the US. In reality though, if we didn't have immigration, our country would be worse off. Immigrants actually take the jobs that nobody in the US takes or wants to take, and that helps our economy. Everyone goes to blaming immigrants right away for taking American jobs, when in reality, they take the jobs that nobody else takes. If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have people working at smaller jobs, but still important ones. For example, lots of immigrants work at corporations like Farmland, where nobody wants to work. Our economy is better because of them. Another benefit of immigrants is that they actually DO pay taxes. People also think they cause overpopulation, but we are actually not closer to being underpopulated than overpopulated. Immigration is extremely hard to fix because when our people are set on something, they do not want to change it. So when people say immigrants are awful and need to be deported, they are very unlikely to change their mind. It is also hard because people automatically think we need to secure the border to keep them out, and that is a very inhumane take on how to fix this problem, especially because that's very expensive and extremely ineffective. Immigrants can be seen as bad people and ARE by most Americans, but they actually do help our economy.
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ReplyDeleteComing into this project I was one sided about this issues in our country. I thought there could not be any good having illegal immigrants in our country, but I was looking at the stereotypical side illegal immigrants. I thought they did not pay taxes which was a big one why I did not agree with illegal immigrants, but they do have to pay taxes. They have to pay gas taxes just like us and different product taxes. The one huge reason that changed my perspective on Illegal immigration is they do the jobs that we do not want to do. If these illegal immigrants were not here, no one would do these dirty jobs and get paid under what you would have to pay an American.
ReplyDeletePostville, Iowa is a great example as to why we need them in our country. They went in and took all of the illegal immigrants out of this company and could not find anyone to want this job. They ended up shutting down the meat packing plant in this town. This shows we actually need them in our country.
So why is Immigration Illegal? If we just opened the doors to everyone in the world everyone would take advantage of our opportunities here in the United States. It will also make for a population overload. There is a problem with Illegal Immigration, but we could not survive without a lot of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_Raid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration
My current issues research project topic is America’s healthcare. This is a very challenging subject for my group because it is a complex issue and there is more than one issue. The reason our health care is so expensive is because not everyone has health insurance. Doctors and hospitals want to be paid, so the overcharge the people who have health insurance to pay for those who don’t. If everyone had health insurance, doctors wouldn’t have to overcharge anymore.I have learned that the biggest problem is Americans now have to buy insurance or else they get a fine. This is very controversial because this is taking away freedom. This is the product of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is commonly known as Obamacare. The goal of this law is to make healthcare more affordable for middle class Americans who make too much money to receive Medicaid, but they still can’t afford health insurance. Obamacare is supposed to be a solution to America’s broken health care system. However, there are very biased opinions. Republicans think this law is the worst way to fix America’s health care, but Democrats believe this plan will work.
ReplyDeleteI have found while researching that Healthcare is a very complex problem in America. Another reason that doctors over charge their patients is due to malpractice lawsuits. Every doctor will have some sort of malpractice lawsuit sometime in their career. By over charging their patients they will have the money to pay their lawyers and the fines of the the malpractice lawsuit. A solution for Healthcare is to have a max for the lawsuit charges. This is the really the only logical solution because if you took malpractice suits away doctors would get careless. If we have a max for the malpractice lawsuits, then doctors wouldn't have to over charge their patients so much.
DeleteI have learned Doctors' support for high insurance for health care is present because of the benefits they solely receive from it. They get sued so much, they need to get payed more. Where is this extra money coming from? High health insurance. Also, people who are terminally sick and just getting obamacare initially when they are sick, without previously having any form of health insurance, spikes up the price of it. Insurance companies and drug manufacturers are also for high prices. Doctors get payed more here than anywhere else in the world due to their private ownership. If they worked for the government on more of a national level, health care would be more similar to that in other countries.
ReplyDeleteSince 2003, I believe the U.S. has always been in fear of terrorists, and groups like ISIS that can be a potential threat to us. ISIS is a growing group that becomes stronger by the increasing amount of members. Currently there is 30,000 ¨fighters¨ that participants with ISIS all ranging from 90 different countries, including some people from the U.S.
ReplyDeleteMany people hear about ISIS and the killings and all the bad things their doing. But not many know how they came about and what their intentions are. Baghdadi, is a man who can be considered as a ring-leader for this group. At first he wanted ISIS to be apart of al Qaeda, but he eventually broke it off into it's own. Their target is the Iraq government. Much of their crimes include taking government oil.
From their crimes and the danger they represent, the Iraq government, has started to receive support even from President Obama to help the country be rid of this group. Military forces have been working endlessly to regain control. To regain control, Obama has sent money and made plans to help their government deal with ISIS.
I think overall ISIS can be taken back into control, but there will most likely be violence that has to happen until it can be resolved. Also if the U.S. continues to provide support to the Iraq government, they will be able to slowly keep regaining that control like they did with oil just recently.
http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/who-iraq/
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/obama-pledges-200-million-iraq-humanitarian-aid-n341386
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/iraqi-forces-retake-much-baiji-oil-refinery-isis-n344031
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/fullpage/isis-trail-terror-isis-threat-us-25053190
Social Security and Medicare are becoming a very important issue. Social Security provides assistance to retired workers, disabled, or deceased family members. These people often have little to no income. Around 158 million people in the U.S. pay taxes and about 57 million people collect these monthly benefits from Social Security. Medicare is a social insurance program that provides health insurance coverage to over 48 million Americans, adults over the age of 65 and others who need disability benefits. Medicare is the largest health insurance program in the United States.
ReplyDeleteFor both Social Security and Medicare, comes a huge problem, which is a long-term shortfall in the money that will be received from taxpayers. There won’t be enough people who will be paying taxes to support the people who need it. In order to fix this problem in the future, some people might become very unhappy.The government could ask the people paying these taxes to pay more, or the people receiving the taxes will ultimately be getting less money. Also, raising the age a few years before people could start collecting this money could help significantly. This will decrease the number of years people collect monthly benefits. A problem to raising the age before they are given the money is that people are starting to live longer than they did in the 1900s. This is also why money is running out. Many years ago, most people only lived until the age of 60, so there weren’t a huge amount of people collecting Social Security and Medicare.
Medicare will effect people first because prices of medications, surgeries, and other treatments are increasing. This will cause the insurance to have to pay more for these treatments. Social Security won’t begin effecting people until 2033, when it is predicted that the money will begin slowly decrease in the amount we have set aside for Social Security. The government should be concerned about both, Social Security and Medicare. If they don’t figure out a plan for the upcoming shortfall, people will not have the money they need.
http://www.nasi.org/learn/socialsecurity
http://www.nasi.org/learn/medicare
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/social-security-present-and-future.html?_r=0
I have the same current issues as Taylor does, and I agree. Social Security and Medicare have become extremely important in the past couple of years, because there are so many old people nowadays, it sounds a little shallow, but it's completely true. All of the old people that need Social Security & Medicare are the decade of Baby Boomers, which was the biggest decade of people ever. This is why it's so important, because it has all of the old people supporting it.
DeleteThe downfall to both of these is definitely the money. It costs so much to have both, that's why many people don't support it, because the people that might need these both, might not have enough money to get both of these things. The other problem is that all of the Baby Boomer decade is dying...and after them there isn't a lot of people that support these two issues. Money is running out, and Social Security and Medicare are what people blame it on. So I definitely agree with Taylor on a bunch of the things that she has expressed.
My current issues project is the issue of immigration. More focusing on the illegal immigration, rather than the legal immigration. Illegal immigration is obviously a huge thing in America. The huge debate is whether it is a good or bad thing and also how are we going to stop it. The problem is as of 2012 there were 11.4 million illegal immigrants. That is a huge number of people that are here undocumented and illegally. They are not supposed to be here but yet they come her for opportunity. While living here illegally and undocumented they don't have to pay all the taxes everyone else is paying to live here. Which is very unfair because what gives them the right to live here for practically free. Also they are taking american's jobs, or that's at least the misconception. These illegals are taking the jobs that the average american wouldn't want to work. Also some say with the illegals they bring drugs and crime to America. In some cases that is true and others it is not. Overall it's the principle that they are not here legally and they didn't earn their right to live here.
ReplyDeleteAnother debate is whether this a real problem. The average american would say yes it is a huge problem. You ask them why and they are gonna say because they hurt the government, they take jobs, and they are criminals. You ask them how they hurt the government and they can't say. You ask them what jobs they take and they admit they take hard labour jobs that the average american wouldn't want to work anyway. When it comes to the criminals they have no facts on how they are criminals. Also in the Postiville, Iowa example when they deported a bunch of illegal immigrants working at a meat plant, the economy collapsed in that town. Because the illegals actually help the economy because they don't have to pay them as much so it makes the cost of goods cheaper. So illegal immigrants can be a good thing.
This problem is so hard to fix because it's so hard to keep them out. The border is 2,000 miles long and we have already spent thousands of more dollars trying to keep them out but it does't work. The border is too big and it's not worth the money. Also no matter what we do all the solutions are extremely expensive. It cost us millions of dollars to deport all the illegal immigrants in Postiville, Iowa after the whole process was over. We don't have money for that, especially when overall they help our economy. The biggest problems with these immigrants is their is no logical solution that won't cost the government a huge amount of money that they don't have. Also the biggest misconception is that they hurt our economy when they don't. So our solution that we came up with is they can easily get a work visa where they come here and work and they have to pay taxes but they can't become a citizen till later. We figured since the process to get this work visa would be so easy and cheap the illegals would be motivated to get this and stop coming here illegally.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2014/10/23/59040/the-facts-on-immigration-today-3/
http://www.infoplease.com/us/immigration/
Healthcare is a tremendous problem in the US, but England seems to have figured it out. They have a universal program called the National Health Service/NHS. England pays less in taxes for their soley government run healthcare and covers more people (everyone who is a citizen of England) than the US. In America, we pay a lot of money in taxes for healthcare, but not a lot of people are covered. The United States can’t switch to a nationally government runned system because of our health insurance companies. If we had a government program like NHS there would be no reason for the health insurance companies to exist. The program would get rid of thousands of jobs, and lobbyist for these companies lobbied very hard during Obamacare to make sure we didn’t switch to a universal healthcare system. Obamacare was a very compromised bill because of the many lobbyist of different interest groups.
ReplyDeleteResearch blog
ReplyDeleteOne important topic I learned about with my current issues project is the middle east relations. ISIS stands for Islamic state of Iraq and Syria,
this name for them is pretty new their first popular name was ISIL because that was the first region they took to control “levant”. this group was created to fight for their strongly Conservative Islamic beliefs which involved server punishment ( stoning amputation, exile ect.) Durning the time Isis has been taking control they use their belief to execute civilians a lot. Mainly people that do not agree to join their cause. from learning about who they are I believe they are showing us their “power” through the people they hurt. This is important to know because America always believed in democracy and freedom of government. This group is not communism but it is a group that wants people to be severely punished for any acts of crime. They have no women's rights and to them amputation is a means of “learning”. In the modern world we live in today we understand that those types of beliefs are not reasonable and punishment and torture should not be intertwined.
One solution I thought about while looking over my notes is that there may possibly be a way to go at this like the cold war. This group feeds on poor, undeveloped countries that are weak and seemingly chaotic. If we build up the resistance of these countries help them with weapons and other means of supplies to fight back we can. But I still believe we need to be more aggressive and stand tall to what is right.
They should know that we are not trying to take away their freedom but because their beliefs would have a 99.9 percent chance of harming others we must step in and contain the issue. my notes also showed that the countries Isis are targeting is Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran so we need to come to terms with them and the other outside parties that are helping to complete a treaty for containment measurements.
http://www.cbsnews.com/isis/
http://theweek.com/articles/443015/republicans-want-scared-isis-democrats-want-scared-gop
Videos for more information
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/one-wish-iran-love-israel-video_n_3713128.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27905425
The problem my group is dealing with is Healthcare. The problem with health care is that we SPEND SO MUCH MONEY ON IT. AND NOT EVERYONE IS COVERED STILL. This is extremely important to understand because in other countries it is absolutely unheard of to have people going without health care. People pay so much because they are paying for the people that get health care and can't pay for it themselves. Some people can't afford health insurance, so they don't go to the doctor's to get the care they need. The current solution to this is ObamaCare. ObamaCare is not for the extremely poor people like many people think. Medicaid covers that area. ObamaCare is for lower class Americans who can't afford health care. Because it was cheaper, better care, so many people rushed to get it, and that made the cost of health insurance go way up. The reason this problem is so hard to fix is because there are doctors and insurance companies lobbying against getting rid of health insurance and just doing a universal health care system. Doctors would have huge pay cuts and insurance companies would be out of business.
ReplyDeleteI agree with emily, the health care industry flat out spends way too much money. I differ from her in the solutions that our group had come up with, we think that the malpractice law cases are hiking up prices in the doctors office. We believe if you give the doctors more room for error, malpractice insurance would go down and the price of your average medical procedure and everything medical related would go down. Many things of Obamacare are actually good, but many of the things that Obamacare entails actually increase the price of medical insurance we believe. The other part of our plan of lowering the cost at the doctors office is not making you get insurance. We think that the younger people don't necessarily need insurance and they are just paying for the older people because they need more medical care.
DeleteDid the cost of healthcare go "way up"? I thought it had been rising slower than every since Obamacare started?
DeleteResearch Blog
ReplyDeleteAs elections will be taking place next year, one thing you're bound to hear is how our nation is trillions of dollars in debt. We most certainly are, but it as big of a problem as everyone thinks? The are probably more misconceptions about debt and deficit, then their are known facts to the general public. One of the major misconceptions is that debt and deficit are the same thing. Debt is the total accumulation of money we owe to various countries and organizations. Deficit or surplus is the yearly difference between the amount we take in and the amount we spend. However surplus isn't really a term the United States if familiar with. The first step to curing the debt is to first stop having a deficit and starting having a surplus.
Another huge misconception is that most of our debt is held with China, or other countries. In fact most of our debt is actually owed to the people, or different parts of the government. For every dollar we owe to China they owe us 83 cents in return, so our debt to other countries isn't as bad as some may think.
Many people say that a simple solution is to just stop spending money, but of course, that isn't going to happen. The problem with this is that many people want the government to help them, but don't want to pay the taxes to fund it. Many complain that our taxes are way too high, but compared to other countries, and even our past taxes, they are actually relatively low. We also spend a huge percent of tax money on defense(the most in the world), and our deficit would decrease if we cut spending on that.
The reason this is so complicated to fix, is because republicans and democrats will not agree on it. Republicans want to cut welfare programs, whereas democrats want to cut defense spending. Democrats want to raise taxes, which frankly I'm in agreement, to help decrease our deficit. If we don't start addressing this problem soon, it could eventually lead to a crisis, and maybe even lead to another Great Depression. If our economy feel it would greatly impact other countries and nations as well.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2015/03/27/senate-and-house-gop-budget-blueprints-are-superior-to-obamas
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/19/news/economy/us-economy-not-growing-fast-enough-summers-paulson/index.html?iid=HP_LN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7N-0q4WgB4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ugDU2qNcyg
The current issue that my group is working on is the U.S./Middle East Relations. Within our topic we have focused on three main subtopics: ISIS, Iran and nuclear weapons, and the situation with Israel. Of the three, I have done the most research on Israel and the situation that they are and have been involved in ever since the country's creation. Israel is completely surrounded by countries that were not in favor of its creation, and in the first few days of existence, Israel was attacked by its new neighbors. Israel somehow survived the attacks and proceeded to keep the land that was acquired during the attacks.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that this is such an important issue for us all the way over here in the U.S, is because of our country's support of Israel. The United States has been in favor and supportive of Israel ever since the day of its creation. The main reason that Israel has been able to survive the numerous attacks is because of the U.S. supplies and support that they receive. The bad part of our support of Israel is that we have begun to antagonize countries that are not for Israel. The situation with Israel does not seem to be going away and every solution that is proposed will seem to cause more problems than it would solve.
Research Blog:
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of misconceptions about the national debt/deficit. For examples, debt and deficit are two different things. Debt is the total amount of money that the government owes, while deficit is the amount of money that the government spent that year. Our debt is not affecting us too much at this time, but if it gets any worse it could affect our economy in a very bad way.
There are several ideas to try to get rid of the debt. One of those may be raising taxes, although if you raised taxes too high all at once, it could end up hurting the U.S. more than helping. One thing that we all know is that Americans do not like paying taxes. On a list of the highest tax paying nations, the U.S. is on the bottom half of the list, so there are many more countries that pay higher taxes than us. Also, Americans pay less taxes today than they did in past years. The tax percent rate line shows that taxes are slowly decreasing over time, which certainly does not help to get rid of our national debt.
Most Americans think that our government owes a lot of debt to foreign countries, but a lot of the money is money that is borrowed from another part of the government. The government puts a lot of money into programs such as Social Security and Healthcare, which people wouldn't want any money cut from because they want stuff from the government. Both of these programs would be examples of mandatory spending, which some type of mandatory spending has to be cut for the government to make any progress on the national debt. The percent of mandatory spending is much higher than the percent of discretionary spending, so cutting from discretionary spending would not do much to help the problem. Also, military is a large portion of the mandatory spending, which might need to be cut to help the national debt but not many would be in favor of that.
Sources:
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/borrowing-and-federal-debt/
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/06/the-many-real-dangers-of-soaring-national-debt
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-long-story-of-us-debt-from-1790-to-2011-in-1-little-chart/265185/
My group presented the Social Security/Medicare Current Issues Project. What I have learned from that project was what exactly Social Security is and what is exactly happening in this world today with it. The major problem with social security is the fact that there are more and more elderly people who retire that the money rate is going down. Retired people aren't going to get as much as they use to close to the year of 2030. So how to solve the problem is just to either simply raise the taxes for all the employed workers, or even raise the retirement age. It will then do a little better of job. The only other problem is, is that we need to start doing something about it now before it is too late, also so we don't have to do everything at the last minute and then rush things. Slowly start making a change now will really help with how the future social security will be.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.socialsecurityreform.org/problem/index.cfm
Excellent! We could have great discussion on any of these.
ReplyDeleteMy group worked on the debt issue. This is probably the biggest issue that America has to deal with, because if we didn't have debt, a lot of these other issues could be solved a lot easier. The reason that debt is such an issue to America is because we are paying for things that we may not even use anymore. An example would be, say we borrowed money to pay for airplane parts in the 90's and now this airplane is just a piece of junk, maybe even recycled now. We will still need to pay back the money that we used for that airplane.
ReplyDeleteSome current events I found with this issue are that congress hasn't decided on a debt ceiling, this could lead to another government shut down because there are three funding limits they haven't decided on, Oct. 1 funding + debt ceiling + sequester. A government shut down is even worse for the debt than if it were to just stay open because you lay a bunch of government workers off then they come back to work and get paid for the time that they were laid off, usually. I also found out that the debt ceiling is just a joke, really. They set an amount for the government not to borrow over, but they ignore the limit and move it up father every single year, so them not deciding on one is causing more issues than what it's worth because it is going to change anyway.
I also found more information that the deficit will be the smallest one in 2015 than it has since 2007. Which is a good thing! A deficit is the difference between the amount of money that the government takes in, and how much it spends. You want the deficit to be very small. I also saw that if we don't find a solution for debt, soon, then it is predicted to hit $7.6 trillion by the year 2015. In order for the government to solve the debt issue, voters and politicians are going to have to make a huge compromise because all politicians want is to be elected and all voters want is assistance from the government, those two things and debt don't go well together.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usnews.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2F2015%2F01%2F28%2Fnational-debt-a-crisis-but-congress-divided-on-fix&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGUWYppsaM5V6W1WmwbPnknSA_EVA
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.cnn.com%2F2015%2F02%2F24%2Fnews%2Feconomy%2Fdebt-ceiling-budget-spending%2Findex.html%3Fiid%3DSF_BN_Lead&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNH5ZqU0bPftbUEezz0yYEW7wAzu1Q
Good except, debt is already at 18 T
DeleteMy group had the topic of the Middle East. We were able to split the presentation into three parts: Israel, Iran, and ISIS and I presented about ISIS.This is a pretty important topic since we kind of need the Middle East on our side because we need their oil, but there are also extremist/terrorist groups that hate the U.S, like ISIS, and they are making things more difficult for everyone. ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and it's an extremist group. What they want to do is establish a Caliphate, which is an Islamic government with one leader, to enforce their own conservative Islamic beliefs and traditions. The leader of ISIS is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he has been extremely careful to be kept hidden and not release much information about himself.
ReplyDeleteWe found there were few positives to have our military intervene but there are many negatives. One of the positives were that it would protect the U.S. from the potential threat of having ISIS attack. Some of the negatives include: cutting off any possible diplomatic relations, resulting in negative outcome, and it could make ISIS worse. If the U.S. were to attack ISIS, so many things could go wrong and even if we fight then, we would have to fight them again years down the road. ISIS would find more people to be on their side and fight with them and would most likely attack us because they would want revenge. There are always going to be people who want to be apart of ISIS and we can't exactly stop all of those people from doing what they want to do. They will also do whatever they want to do to get what they want, including taking U.S. americans as hostage and killing them on camera.
Currently, ISIS is trying to recruit teenagers from anywhere they can. They now have a two billion dollar budget so they are able to get people to recruited even when they are 2,000 miles away. An example would be Aqsa Mahmood, she was a 19 year old who left her home to go to school one morning in November 2013 and she never came home. She didn't go to class, she actually went to Syria and married a jihad fighter and is now a poster girl for ISIS. They also make videos showing "sexy" jihadists fighters who can be potential husbands for girls and so they think they are "guaranteed a ticket to paradise". There have also been more teenagers who are trying to flee their homes and travel to Syria so they can join ISIS and fight or even marry the fighters. So even though ISIS isn't here in the U.S. they are affecting us and using social media and other means to try to get more people to fight with them. The solution we thought of is to make an agreement with Iran to try and build their government to be stronger and then use their troops to fight ISIS. Later, if they need more help then the U.S. will interfere and use our military to help fight. There is no right way to handle ISIS but this is the best idea we thought of.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-recruiting-teenagers-why-the-government-is-sounding-the-alarm/
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/fullpage/isis-trail-terror-isis-threat-us-25053190
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24179084
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/27/opinions/aamer-isis-recruiting-western-teenagers/
Immigration is a very confusing topic that is really hard to address. Even some of the people in the same party don’t agree on everything together. I think the main topic people don’t get is that all illegal immigrants pay taxes. Many people think that they don’t pay taxes and then they use the benefits that we pay for, this is not true in fact they pay taxes on things like social security and they don’t get the benefits. People also say that illegal immigrants take peoples jobs and that’s how our unemployment rate goes up. This is also not true because illegal immigrants almost always take the jobs we don’t want because they are hard and they don’t pay very good. If an illegal immigrant that can’t speak your language takes your job then you should really consider how hard of a worker you really are. When they take lower jobs like meat packing plants they help lower the cost of meat products. Without immigrants taking those jobs the food prices would go up because no one would want to work there and if they did they would want to be paid at a much higher rate. Overall I believe that immigration is a good thing, it can help our country in many different ways.
ReplyDeleteSocial Security and Medicare was one of the easiest "problems" to understand. Social Security is when the government provides money to people who are unable to work because they are old, disabled, or unemployed. Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people who are 65 or older, certain younger people with disabilities. The biggest problem of the entire thing is our age of living has increased and people are retiring at age 65. We need to make the retirement age later, so we don't have to tax so much. The biggest issue is that no politician wants to do that. It'll decrease their voters and all the old white people will be against it. There is really no solutions, but sooner or later the age to retire is going to have to get moved down.
ReplyDeleteI started this project off totally dreading it. But as I read more and more into the national debt/deficit problem it started to become very interesting. It is a very complex and complicated issue. We can't solve it by just raising the taxes, or by just cutting spending. It most definitely can't be solved quickly. We as Americans need to be patient. The issue will be resolved eventually. There is a lot about the debt problem that Americans don't understand. Two of the biggest points would be that A. our debt isn't as big of a problem as politicians make it out to be and B. we don't pay as much in taxes as we think.
ReplyDeleteThe reason our debt isn't a massive problem that is going to end the world is because most of our debt we owe to ourselves. Contrary to popular belief, China and Japan do not own us. We don't owe those countries 17 trillion dollars and they can't decide to collect what we do owe them anytime they want. The majority of our debt is owed to American citizens. It is intergovernmental debt, which is way less dangerous than debt owed outside of the country. So we shouldn't be worrying about it as much as we are.
The second point is that today in America, people HATE taxes. We in America think we pay a ton of taxes, when in reality, that isn't true at all. We pay taxes like any other country. We are actually in the bottom half group of countries in the world for tax rates. In comparison to what we used to pay in America. Today, compared to 50-60 years ago, we are paying significantly less. After the depression and during World War 2 tax rates were extremely high because the government really needed the money. Today that isn't the case, the government does need the money, but not as desperately.
One very important concept to understand about the debt problem is mandatory and discretionary spending. This is why it becomes such messy business when cutting spending. Discretionary spending is what the government sets a new budget for every year (military, education). Mandatory spending is what the government has already promised people they will get (social security, healthcare). We can't cut mandatory spending, we can only cut people's eligibility for those programs. We can cut discretionary spending, but it only makes up about 30% of the total budget. Mandatory spending is where the big bucks are. Problem is, it's very complicated to cut it. This is why we can't just say, let's cut this, let's cut that. It is more complex than that and should be understood by more Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ugDU2qNcyg
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/28/national-debt-a-crisis-but-congress-divided-on-fix
As the upcoming election is approaching, most americans believe that the U.S election is the only one that matters, but what they don't understand is that U.K's upcoming election matters just as much if not more to the future of the U.S. The U.K has a special relationship with the U.S, and they have dreams of breaking away from NATO, a staple in the safety of our nation.
ReplyDeleteThe reason the election is so important to the U.S is if Prime minister David Cameron stays in power, the United Kingdom will stay on the path to independence. This could cause a major problem for the united states as we depend on the UK to be our allies.
The UK's new idea of independence is coming from people complaining of local problems rather than large scale problems. They want to be a country where their main goal is the wellness of the people. There are two main parties in UK's political system, the conservatives and the Labour.
The conservatives want to benefit the rich and the labour want the people to come first, kind of like the US's political parties
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/30/politics/uk-elections-david-cameron-ed-miliband/index.html
Good.
ReplyDeleteThis project taught me a lot about debt and the deficit. First off, I learned that there is a difference between debt and deficit. Deficit is the difference between what the government spends and takes in. Debt is the total amount of outstanding liability. A lot of people don't really understand the difference between them and politicians tend to use that to their advantage. They will talk about cutting the deficit in half and many times people think that means fixing the debt problem. The main issue with debt is that our tax money is going towards paying off things from 30 years ago. We want our money going towards stuff that will benefit us not paying off debt. There are a few possible solutions to fixing debt but they are mostly unrealistic. Some people would say to cut things like welfare or social security, but we need these. If we cut less important things or stopped giving money to other countries, it wouldn't even make much of a difference. Another solution would be to raise taxes, but if a politician wanted to do that, they are very unlikely to get elected. If we did things like cut spending or raise taxes they'd have to be done gradually overtime.
ReplyDeleteResearching our project on medicare and social security taught me that people could easily prevent the problems with Medicare and Social Security, but would much rather blame it on the government. The key is being proactive, and taking initiative when younger on topics such as retirement. Planning ahead with a 401(k) is one of the best ways to not be caught having to rely on social security. It is an individual thing that we should take control of our futures. Not everyone will do it, but if the average American did, it would tremendously decrease the problem. It becomes a lot easier for Congress to decide how to handle if the problem isn’t as complex and big.
ReplyDeleteMy project for presentations was health care. While researching our topic I began to realize how complex and confusing the topic of health care really is. As my group got farther into the project we struggled to figure out a way to solve this issue, due to all the issues that every solution would bring. Every other industrialized country has a universal health care system where everyone is insured and covered. The huge problem with having that system in the U.S. is that it would cause all of the insurance companies to go out of business. Another reason universal health care would not work in the U.S is because it would also cause Americans taxes to be raised. The first thing that comes to American's minds when they hear taxes is that they are awful. Overall, health care is ongoing issue that seems almost impossible to full solve, especially in the United States.
ReplyDeleteThe major problem with Social Security and Medicare is eventually we will get to the point where there will not be enough money in those programs to give everyone a full check. Instead, there will only be enough to pay roughly 70-80 percent of full checks. This is all caused because of the baby boom, causing more people receiving these benefits than we have had previously. The problem will not occur until roughly 2030, which is quite a ways off, and that's why people keep putting the problem off. If we were to just make very small changes right now we could solve the problem easy. Unfortunately many people want to just wait as long as possible, and if we wait too long then we will have to make drastic changes that everyone will absolutely hate. This is why Social Security and Medicare should be dealt with right now.
ReplyDeleteRESEARCH BLOG:
ReplyDeleteThe main problem that most Americans have with immigration of any sort is their lack of knowledge on the topic. Regardless of your political views liberal or conservative there is stone cold data and history to prove that getting rid of all illegal immigrants would crash the U.S. economy into another Great Depression. Most Americans would say that they are only against illegal immigration, but this is not true most if not all of those that say this are actually fully against all kinds of immigration legal or not.
I typed that the U.S. economy would crash and this is true because of what we tried to do in Postville, Iowa. Ironically it happened in our home state. What happened in Postville was a large police sting operation where they busted around 400 illegal immigrants working in the factory in Postville. The events that happened next really put what would happen if we took all of the illegal immigrants out of the country. The Postville economy took a nose dive and stayed put in the ground making the town and surrounding areas into a ghost town. So the question for "What would happen if we took out all illegals has been answered."
The biggest question though is if we cannot get rid of illegal immigrants what can we do? We are essentially left with two options: We could take the Steve King route and put concrete on our borders and kill anyone who tries to come across illegally or make the process to become a U.S. citizen easier. Option 1 is just wrong while option 2 looks kind of like a free pass for anyone to come in whenever. After studying immigration for a week or so I can honestly say that none of the solutions sound appealing. Yet I am unsure if anything necessarily has to be done about. My view on the issue leans more towards amnesty for anyone who is already over here make them a citizen or whatever, but only then afterwards we should strengthen the border only allow a select few come over... legally of course.
http://www.uscis.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/immigration
I had the topic of both Social Security and medicare. Now everybody knows that it is the government that is helping pay for both of those things. But in all reality its the tax payers that is really paying for all of the money going to the people involved with both medicare and social security. There has been a lot of talk that when we get old enough to retire and get our money, there will be no money left to give anybody that is retiring. Well, we talked during class and its honestly impossible for the money to run out, and for us not to be able to retire when that age comes around because we are all paying into it right now if we have a job. We get taxes taken out of our pay checks every two weeks, or however often you get paid. So we would be getting screwed if we got jipped out of retirement. Now we came up with the solution of taxing more, or raising the retirement age because of the baby boom. We are going to have a lot of people retiring in the next couple of years because of the baby boom. We felt like it wasn't logical to completely get rid of social security, but it would be smart to either raise the taxes, or raise the retirement age. Our economy is trillions of dollars in debt and we are continuing to put a ton of money into these programs and that is the problem.
ReplyDeleteThe Middle East is a big problem for the world. The tension over Israel with the religion problems is what is causing the tension. Since the U.S. supports Israel the surrounding countries lose in battles because they lack the high technology. But the problem is that all the surrounding countries to Israel think that the holy land of Jerusalem is rightfully theirs and Israel just took it after the World War 2. In 1947 the U.S. placed Israel as a place for the Jewish religion to go to.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem with the Middle East is the Iran Nuclear problem. The U.S. is very hypocritical about nuclear war heads. They do not want others to have the missiles because they are scared they will use them even though we are allowed to make millions and use them in times of war. Iran has been making treaties to agree they are not making missiles, but those are being broken and many rockets are being formed. The breaking of treaties is the final step to war besides land advancement or partnerships in countries.
How the U.S. ties into this is because the U.S. is a global force for peace. But to get peace we use force to get rid of the dangerous force. Also we provide the technology and the weapons to support the good forces to keep the ground equal and the war down to a minimum so surrounding countries wont attack. The U.S. has done good keeping ties between countries governments to keep treaties together and to stay away from war break outs, but soon that will dissolve and a rash action will be committed.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/world/iran-nuclear-talks-21-questions/
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/08/world/israel-neighbors/
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/04/world/meast/gaza-israel-why-civilian-deaths/
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ReplyDeleteThe topic I was assigned for this project was the Middle East and the US foreign relations. When Iraq and Iran are talked about in the news, they make them seem like such a huge threat to us and that we need to get into our bomb shelters real quick. But its not like that at all. We are allies right now. The only fear we have is ISIS and if Iran decides to break the treaty and build a nuclear bomb. We have eyes over there so its not like we won't notice. Plus, the US is way stronger than any other country in the world. We don't really do much with the middle east problem because the two sides, democrats and republicans, basically want the same thing. ISIS is probably the main threat to us right now, especially if they are responsible for the Texas incident over the weekend. Before this project I really didn't know much about the middle east, besides the fact that there were a ton of little countries with names that sounded similar. After spending a few days researching, I actually understand the concept of Palestine, and why the Jews and Arabs are at war. I don't think that much is going to change for the US foreign relations plan, because what else can we really do? We are already over there doing our part, keeping the peace.
ReplyDeleteok
ReplyDeleteMy topic was Social Security and Medicare. Both of these are a minute threat as of right now, but in the years to come, we will have some trouble funding these programs. The reasons these programs will lose some funding are 1- the baby boomer generation is going to begin retiring in the next 10-20 years, and 2-there are more of them than there are of my generation. What this means is that there will be more people drawing out of social security and medicare than people paying in. In order to fix this, we should raise the taxes that pay for this service by small increments now, instead of changing it by a few percentage points down the road. This is a relatively easy issue to fix as of right now, however, since it's not as pressing as some of the other issues, I would be surprised if it got fixed until it is more pressing.
ReplyDeleteResearch Blog:
ReplyDeleteBefore we began our Current Issues Project, I had some idea there were many conflicts going on in the Middle East, but I never really understood them all. After conducting some research, I soon learned that our conflicts in the Middle East are very vast and complex, but many of our problems seem to arise out of Iran.
Our foreign relations with Iran date back all the way to 1953, when our government helped overthrow Mossadegh. Then, in 1979 our biggest conflict with the Middle Eastern country occurred when a group of Iranian college students captured 66 hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran. This was done in protest of our continued support of the Shah of Iran, and the hostages were eventually released the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on January 20th, 1981.
More recently, we have had an ongoing concern about the possibility of Iran being able to obtain nuclear weapons. Nuclear threats have been made, but President Obama and his administration have been working to negotiate the conflict with Iran in order to solve it. The problem is however, although there is consensus that both Democrats and Republicans want the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran to dissolve, both sides seem to become more polarized as they each have their own way they would go about to solve the problem.
Sources:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/republicans-iran-114521.html
http://time.com/3830214/ian-bremmer-iran-nuclear-deal/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis