U.S. becoming 'spineless and brainless nation'

A guest column I wholeheartedly agree with from Yeh Ling-Ling executive director of the Alliance for a Sustainable USA, a national nonprofit organization based in California, about the rapid decline of the United States.

U.S. becoming 'spineless and brainless nation'

By Yeh Ling-Ling

The United States went from being the world's greatest creditor nation to being the world's greatest debtor nation in less than three decades. What happened?

While serving as comptroller general of the United States, David Walker urged our national leaders to learn from the fall of Rome. He warned that the U.S. budget deficits, extended wars abroad, health care and immigration are critical issues that require immediate actions.

Indeed, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost American taxpayers more than $1 trillion, according to some estimates.

Our national debt has already exceeded $12 trillion, with no end in sight. American leaders should be told that most empires eventually fell due to the extended wars that bankrupted their treasuries.

If the above wars were to ensure our homeland security, why have our own borders remained so porous? Are most elected officials in Washington, D.C., not aware that many terrorists and criminal aliens live on U.S. soil?

Incredibly, most American leaders also lack courage and common sense in addressing other issues.

According to a Thomson Reuters report released Oct. 26, waste in the U.S. health-care system could total up to $850 billion a year.

Census data also show that recent immigrants and their U.S.-born children under 18 account for more than 70 percent of the growth of the uninsured population in the U.S.

Instead of working on trimming waste and reducing immigration as first steps to achieve sensible health-care reform, President Obama and Congress count on borrowing more from other countries to finance our needs.

The high costs of teen pregnancies, totaling 750,000 a year nationwide, have also been ignored.

Instead of enacting some sort of immigration moratorium so that we can put unemployed Americans, welfare recipients and nonviolent prisoners to work, Washington, D.C., has chosen to extend unemployment benefits and give out welfare costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars yearly.

President Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to create jobs for Americans. Yet he is promoting amnesty for possibly 20 million illegal aliens and massive numbers of "guest worker" visas. If his misleading "comprehensive immigration reform" is enacted, it will result in millions of new voters and an explosion of legal and illegal immigration!

Although some immigrants are assets to the U.S., most do not pay enough in taxes to cover the costs of social services rendered to their families due to their mostly low incomes.

Will our leaders ever realize that adding millions of people to the U.S. population every year essentially means more job seekers and patients as well as higher expenses for infrastructure?

Sadly, the United States, once the land of the free and the brave, is fast becoming a spineless and brainless nation.

Yeh Ling-Ling, a naturalized American citizen born in Vietnam of Chinese parents, is executive director of the Alliance for a Sustainable USA (www.asustainableusa.org), a national nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif.