» GARY GOLDBERG
APSU COLLEGE REPUBLICANS POLITICAL DIRECTOR
Guest Writer
With the 2012 presidential election only a matter of weeks away, people have asked me, “why should the APSU community vote for the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?” I believe there are a number of reasons that one could point out to vote for Romney for president. However, there is one reason that has been growing and growing and this is the national debt.
The national debt topped $16 trillion earlier this year in September. This leaves every United States citizen owing at total of $51,000 if we all had to pay the debt that our nation has accumulated. However, seeing as that total is based off of the number of citizens — including newborns, babies, teens, young adults, adults and the elderly, in the country—not the number of people that pay taxes. If you leave the amount of debt to just the hard-working men and women of this country, the amount of debt that is owed is $141,000 per taxpayer.
The average college student graduates with somewhere around $25,000 in student loan debt, which is a grand total for the average college student graduating $166,000 in debt. That is roughly a payment of $462.00 a month for the next 30 years. This is to assume that the college student can find a job after college with the average college graduate unemployment rate being 50 percent.
The national debt in this country has been growing and growing for generations. Like most things in politics it is talked about, and it is debated, then passed-on for the next generation to deal with, just like the challenges of civil rights. This is not a fight that we have asked for, but it is our fight now.
In 2008, then candidate, Obama said, “The problem is, is that the way [George] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”
Yet, under now President Obama the national debt has hit $16 trillion that has been around $7 trillion in just 4 years.
We have to make the hard choice and not vote for who we like best, but vote for who will get the job done. Mitt Romney has said he will cut the debt and that’s who we need vote for, and if he fails like so many before him, we will vote him out as well.
