Learning Ecosystems

From DSC:
I’m not a political science expert and I won’t pretend to be one…but I did study economics and I don’t see what happened leading up to — and including — Tuesday night as any sort of victory or solid deal for America.  Delaying the tough decisions is not helping us — the time will come when we have to pay the piper.  Eventually, there will be pain. But will that pain start in 2013? I hope so. Because the longer the debt builds, the harder it will be to conquer it and the more pain we’ll need to get through (eventually).  In fact, eventually 100% of our taxes will go towards just paying the interest on the debt if we follow the current trajectories.  Printing more money won’t help the  situation either, as inflation is likely to escalate at that point.

Backing up a bit…here are some resources on what happened on Tuesday night with the Fiscal Cliff in the United States:

• Obama signs bill warding off fiscal cliff — from CNN by Matt Smith
  Cliff deal hollow victory for American people — from CNN by David Rothkopf (CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
  Excerpt:
  (CNN) — The last political drama of 2012 and the first one of 2013 suggest that if you love America, you might want to consider making your New Year’s resolution quitting whatever political party you belong to. The “fiscal cliff” debate and the last-minute deal it produced have so far resolved nothing except to show that our system is profoundly broken and that radical changes are needed to fix it.
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• Fiscal cliff was bound to collapse — from CNN by Gloria Borger
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• After the fiscal cliff: What comes next? — from macleans.ca and the AP
  Excerpt:
  By delaying painful decisions on spending cuts, the deal assures more confrontation and uncertainty, especially because Congress must reach agreement later this winter to raise the government’s debt limit. Many businesses are likely to remain wary of expanding or hiring in the meantime.
  …
  Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist for the Economic Outlook Group, thinks the lack of finality in the budget fight is slowing an otherwise fundamentally sound economy. “What a shame,” Baumohl said in a research note Wednesday. “Companies are eager to ramp up capital investments and boost hiring. Households are prepared to unleash five years of pent-up demand.”
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• 3 more fiscal cliffs loom — from CNN by Rich Barbieri

From DSC:
The media loves to divide. They hate to unite. Evidently, unity doesn’t pay the bills .

(BTW, to the remaining journalism majors out there — strive to build up and help our country, and try not to feed the flames of division just so that your organizations’ ratings go up.  Watch whose agendas are truly being served and the verbiage you use.  Unfortunately, as a Christian,  I can’t say much for the church, as there are fractions throughout the church as well.)

Getting back to what’s on my mind…delaying the pain is just making the future pain all the worse.  Let’s bite the bullet, compromise, work together, and go through the pain now rather than later.  If we wait too long, our children will be paying the price for our ways.

As educators, it looks like we need to beef up those parts of the curriculum that deal with collaboration and creative compromise!