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The current government of the US can be blamed on one thing and one thing only: greed. No matter what your interests are, if you have enough money and you can get close enough to a powerful politician to bribe them, you can get them to do just about anything you want them to and they will find a way to spin it around to make it seem like a good decision to the American public. As horrible as it is, I must say, I am fascinated by how easy it is sometimes.

During the elections, all of the politicians try to sell themselves as the best person for the job and our job as the voters, is to try to decide who will be the candidate who is least likely to take money from lobbyists who do not have the best interests of the country or its citizens in mind. Sadly, the candidates do such a good job most of the time, that we are wrong about them. A lot of the time, we choose a candidate who takes the money and makes a choice based on the highest payout. There are a few politicians that do not take money from lobbyists, but they seem to get lost in the sea of those who do. A lot of the decisions that were made during the last presidency, can be blamed on greed. Halliburton and the contracts that they had with the US government, are a perfect example of this. They cost the taxpayers millions of dollars that could have gone to good things like education, just because of the connection to the president that they had. I would still be curious to know how much he made off of that deal.

I think that one of the first steps that we could take to try to prevent greed from getting in the way of the government's ability to make decisions that benefit everyone, is to set up an internal department that will monitor each and every decision that is made and how much contact that the decision making political has with those that would directly benefit from that decision the most. For example, if a politician needs to make a decision about cleaning up the local waterways in their particular part of the country, whether it be state, city, or county, there needs to be scrutiny in how the funds that are set aside to accomplish that are appropriated. If the finds were set aside to clean the local water and prevent pollution, there should be documentation that proves that all of the money was used to do that and not given to someone else to be used in some unrelated way.

In my state not too long ago, there was an instance where there was some unprofessional conduct going on in the attorney general's office and after the investigation had begun to dig up some other things about the office, the authorities had found that one of the people on the staff of the attorney general, had used state funds to finance a construction business that he had started on the side. There are many people in my state that have been laid off because there is no money in the budget to pay them, which contributes to the unemployment rate of not only the state, but also to the country as a whole. If there was a separate department that was created to audit and enforce the appropriate funding of all of the different departments of the government, this may not have happened and if it had, it would have been found out before there was an investigation into a completely unrelated incident.

If it were not for greed, this country would probably be a lot different. There would not be an insatiable need to have the most money and the most expensive houses and cars. Politicians would not need to make bad decisions just because someone is willing to pay them a lot of money to do so. There should be stiff penalties for taking any money from lobbyists if you are a representative of the government and that includes campaign contributions.

Learn more about this author, Jamie Pancake.
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