Barack Obama

These issues and events, to me, are some of the most important of this century. You may notice that 9/11 is conspicuously absent from the list - but I figure that it’s pretty well accepted that 9/11 is among the important events of recent years, so I thought I would address others. It’s a sort of compliment to your intelligence, really, that I don’t feel I need to hit you over the head with the really obvious ones. But, I’m rambling - let’s get back on track, shall we?

1. Rise of social media

Here are three events that have happened in the 21st Century that I find important and momentous:

Emily Miller's opinion piece called "Obama's debt ultimatum ," from
the Washing Post the author argues against raising the debt ceiling. She is kind of zinging Obama and believes that we shouldn’t raise the debt ceiling.

Miller uses Pathos by calling the piece "Obama's debt ultimatum." It is been
made clear through reading through two of her pieces that she is a
hard core republican. She is trying to make Obama look bad by calling
his solution to the fiscal cliff an "ultimatum."

"Americans took out more student and auto loans in September to boost consumer borrowing to a record level. But they cut back on credit card borrowing, a sign many remain cautious about taking on high-interest debt. " (csmonitor)

It’s official. President Barack Obama will serve another term as the leader of our country. But how will unemployment change? People out there still need money and still don’t have jobs. Now that we know who our president will be, has there been and will there be a change in this countries employment rate?

Unemployment is a major issue in this election. During this time of economic crisis many people have been laid off and are in search of work. But the fact that many people are unemployed is not the only problem. Many people have been forced to take up jobs in which they are very unhappy in order to pay the bills. Barack Obama feels that the solution to this is more government spending on unemployment insurance and public work projects, in the hopes that they will create jobs and improve the government’s infrastructure. But this is only a temporary way to improve the job market.

The other day in class we took two surveys, Vote Easy and Select Smart to see which candidate we are most aligned with. I was 89% and 98% respectively for Obama. I'm definitely a democrat so neither surprised me very much. The two most important issues to me are Immigration and balancing the budget. Immigration hits somewhat close to home for me due to the fact that my grandparents were immigrants from China in the late 1940s during the communist revolution there.

In our generation, win we hear "equal rights" we directly associate this phrase with LGBT rights- mainly in support of gay marriage. But personally, when I say, "I believe in equal rights" it means that I believe in equal rights for all. I believe in equal rights for the LGBT community- including marriage, visitation rights, the right to openly serve in the military (the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell), or to not be discriminated against in job selection.

The presidential debate happened just the other night and I tuned in, not just for extra credit in Economics but ti get a better understanding of who I want to vote for. After almost 50 minutes of debating, each candidate left the stage and polls, stats, opinions started popping up everywhere. We even had a discussion in Economics the next day where myself and Sydney were basically the only ones with an opinion.

In the Presidential debate on Wednesday night, there seemed to be quite a few accusations that each candidate denied the other of saying it was true. So, how much of these accusations really were true. I researched on FactCheck.org to find out how much of both Obama's and Romney's accusations, as well as promises each candidate made, really had substance, and here's just some of what I found:

Obama accused Romney of proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. Not true. Romney proposes to offset his rate cuts and promises he won’t add to the deficit.