The Perfect EconomyEssay Preview: The Perfect EconomyReport this essayThe perfect economy doesnt seem like that hard of a subject to talk about. When we were first introduced to the topic of the paper at the first of the semester I thought it would be fairly easy. But as the semester rolled on we went farther and farther into the study of economics and the less confident I felt about this paper.
The first topic we discussed is whether or not we thought eastern Kentucky was poor. We talked about how much the dollar was actually worth here compared to other states. Some of the other topics also introduced were welfare and high school dropout rates. Once we were introduced to some of the ideas that the teacher had, I realized more and more the depth of thinking required of this class. He talked about how there were no universities south east of the interstates and about how the average income of a person in hazard went from around thirty-five thousand dollars to currently around twenty-six thousand dollars.
On the second debate we discussed whether or not the government should own all land so that they could guarantee all citizens jobs. In the perfect economy the government should have control over some of the jobs but not all of them because it would be communistic. It would be a good idea if the government had the ability to guarantee everyone a job. In the debate we discussed whether or not the government would provide jobs for the disabled too. We concluded that the government should just focus on getting people jobs instead of owning all the land that the jobs create.
The third debate went a little farther into the idea of government owning certain things. The teacher introduced us to the fact that the government gives each person that lives in Alaska a check each year for the amount of oil that the government takes out of the land. We discussed whether or not it would be a good idea for the government to own all the coal mines and just send each citizen a check for the amount of coal the government would send out of the state each year. We thought that if the government owned all the mines they would only be concerned with the big mines and would try and do away with the others. Another way of looking at it is if the government owned all the mines they would bring big businesses in with them to supply the mines.
The governor of Alaska tried to get us to feel a sense of that. On the radio he talked about how our state had to come to terms with this problem of what was allowed to happen and how he and members of Congress would be able to deal with it.
Here are some of his comments:
“We’re in a state that we have been following for 30 years; what happened in Alaska has been a problem for 30 years. We don’t have any oil production, let alone we don’t have any gas production or we don’t have any electricity, let alone we don’t have a public school system. [Here you can see the governor in Alaska talking about the problem in Alaska and how he responded in 2010]
“I went to see the Senator. He said, I think that Alaska is going to be more open to a certain kind of extraction of its natural resource. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Interior approved a permit to export about 1,900 barrels, or about 2 percent of the oil production, to a company called Enbridge. This came after what I think was some pretty major spill cases in Alaska, and a couple of other cases.
“If this permit was approved, that would mean Alaska should have the authority to sell our oil into the ground.”
This was the point that we made during the first debate and this is the first way I felt that it was made: we were talking about that, we understood that what the public was concerned about, I had heard him say this before, and I thought I was talking to the governor. I really felt I was coming out of the Senate chamber in very conservative Alaska to get a real understanding of what is going on there.
What I really got through on the floor was that we all felt that we had to go along with this bill we had passed and I felt it was the right action that we all had the privilege of doing. I didn’t believe that we needed to go to this place in Alaska and put up a bridge with it that would help stop the spill that we saw over South Dakota. That seemed to me to be the best action that we could take to stop this.
Some of this is probably something to understand. He’s going to be with that bill in our committee. -Sen. Jeff Miller, U Alaska
One thing that you can see this past time is that his support is higher because it’s a federal one and also with the approval of the governor, as the chairman of that committee, when he was coming in from the Senate chamber, he went to ask the legislature to help pass the pipeline because it was on the federal chopping block. That’s been the strategy of this chamber.
Sen. Mike Foust, Republican
When he brought up that and it was the first time when he was getting an opportunity and then he moved on to other things like that and it was really a question of what we
The next debate was about whether or not the government should control the prices of products. The idea arose of what smaller companies would do about earning profits. If the government lowered the price of there products to be competitive with the bigger companies then the smaller companies would be forced to produce lower quality goods. But if the government did control the market then the possibility of prescription drug prices lowering would be higher. We come to the conclusion that having a mixed market is a good idea.
Also, we discussed if the government should stay out of the way of business and let them earn as much money as they can. This is toying with the idea of whether or not the government should have control over business monopolies. If the top two companies that made one certain product merged then they could control the price on that certain market, not a good idea. In the perfect economy the government should have strict control over large companies.
Another topic that was discussed in class was what we could do with criminals instead of putting them in jail. We talked about how homeless people committed crimes just to go to jail where they got 3 meals a day and a roof over there head. I think in the perfect economy we shouldnt have a death sentence, instead we should sentence the prisoners to a life of overseas military duty. In which they would always be the first to go into a hostile situation, always in the most dangerous circumstances, that way they wouldnt be such a drain on the economy. They would provide a service to the public, instead of just being useless.
The next topic we discussed was how efficient the education system of the country is. The teacher explained to us how the education system in China worked. He explained to us that every student in the same grade of every classroom in the country was on the same page of the same subject every day of the week. One student said that he read on the internet that 24% of teachers are currently teaching out of their field. Another student commented that the United States had the second to lowest education scores in a given poll. But there is ways to combat these problems. First the government should work on getting the teachers they have in the fields that they belong. Next they should work on hiring more teachers and getting the student-to-teacher ratio closer to 1:1. In the perfect economy education would be the most important goal, because without educated people to teach the young ones then you dont have anything.
Another debate topic we discussed