What 2012 means for me and you

As a senior, I am worried about graduating. If you are a senior, you should be worried, too, and not because our days of being able to regularly play Sink the Biz at Nicks or enjoy Wednesday night trivia at Kilroys are limited.

Rather, I hope your worry is the future state of our great country and the abysmal economy that all of us will soon find ourselves graduating into.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, in August the unemployment rate will remain more than 8 percent until at least 2014. When you break that statistic down by age, the current unemployment rate among 16- to 25-year-olds is a staggering 18.1 percent, the highest of any age bracket.

What does this mean for you and me? If there are any jobs to be found, competition for them is fierce. As will most likely be the case, jobs will go to those with the most experience.

Using this frame of reference, my appeal to all of you is to consider carefully who you will vote for next year. If you were able to vote for Obama in 2008, do not make the same mistake and vote for him again just because it was cool to do so in 2008.

Don’t let the Left-wingers on MSNBC or the Right-wingers on Fox make up your mind for you. Rather, take an hour or two of your life to read up on the alternatives and make up your own mind.

As the chairman of the College Republicans, I get asked all the time what the Democrats have done wrong and what I would have done differently. I tell them some of the following:

First, I would not have shoved a $1 trillion healthcare mandate onto the back of an already uncertain economy.

It truly is a failed piece of public policy, with the exceptions of making insurance companies allow pre-existing conditions for kids and allowing young people to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until they are 26.

It fails miserably at achieving its intended purpose: making health care more affordable. I would not have filled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with a bunch of Big Labor union hacks.

What resulted was an unprecedented intervention by the NLRB, which told Boeing it could not start a new manufacturing facility in South Carolina because it was a Right-to-Work state. The facility would have provided an additional 4,000 jobs.

I would have taken the lead with both parties in Congress to ensure that an annual federal budget was passed. The furious debate about the future state of our nation’s Treasury began way before Republicans took back the house in January.

Just last year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was the leader of the first Congress to not pass a budget since modern budgeting began decades ago. Sunday marked the 900th day since Senate Democrats have passed a budget.

What’s bewildering is this was all done by a government unified with Obama in the White House and clear Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Blaming our August AAA downgrade by S&P rating agency on House Republicans? I would ask you to think about that one again.

I would have not put an envirostatist in charge of the EPA. Recently, it threatened to shut down many of our nation’s coal-fired power plants, which would have led to as much as an 8 percent reduction in our nation’s energy output.

Instead, I would get the EPA off the backs of American business and push the nation forward on a path of energy independence. This can be achieved through harvesting our own natural resources, streamlining unnecessary bureaucratic red tape and building a new energy infrastructure that can accommodate renewable energy such as wind and solar.

While I will always respect the president and his service to our country, there has to come a point when we as the people have a right to not hire him for another term. While he did inherit a mess, I think it is time to stop blaming ‘the past eight years,’ and take some ownership of the current situation.

­— cjcaudil@indiana.edu