America's Problem

After careful thought and revision, I have decided that there are too many things wrong with the American political system to properly use in the scope of this memo. The speed at which the government makes decisions and enacts legislation is incredibly slow, and there may not be anyway around this without curtailing some of our personal freedoms, unfortunately. Beyond that, dismantling the current bureaucracy would cause sever economic backlash as it employs hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. As for the freedoms we have received under this government, people largely take them for granted. The system would work far better if our voter turnout wasn’t so abysmally low every election, as policy would probably work out better for everyone. Speaking of policy making, the incumbency rating is much too high, making new faces in politics a rare sight. In many cases politicians end up returning for another term even after doing a terrible job in their previous attempt. As for the presidential elections the crop of candidates to choose from seems to be increasingly weak, resulting in a choice between the lesser of two evils, as was the case in the 2004 election. In my personal opinion, neither Kerry nor Bush were particularly good candidates, and looking at our current debacle of an administration I’d say I was probably right. Internally, events like Katrina have demonstrated how woefully unprepared we are for emergency situations and how truly corrupt our government is.
So what is the cause of all these problems? One large part is the American way of thought, as evidenced by the abysmally low voter turnout compared to almost anywhere else in the world. As far as the speed and efficiency of our government is concerned, the bureaucracy is far too entrenched to deal with in any useful way. Beyond that, events over the past couple years have demonstrated that the government is unbelievably corrupt, which does nothing to help the American people or the government. Really this list could be much longer and better developed, but for most things the cause of our problems comes down to a real simple issue: incompetence. This incompetence starts with low voter turnout and escalates as it reaches corrupt officials and even our current President, perhaps the most paramount case. America needs to really take a good long look at itself before we get to the point where we just need time to fix things.