On January 9, the 44th president of the United States will be sworn into office. This president will inherit from his predecessor a number of problems this country is facing, including high gas prices, rapidly increasing social security costs, and out of control spending.

Thanks to an ever-growing demand and a shrinking supply of oil, gas prices have continued to increase. Not only does this impact Americans directly, by increasing the cost of personal transportation, but higher gas prices may also be reflected in the price of any product that must be shipped, trucked or transported because of the increase in supply costs.

One very effective way to go about lowering the price of oil would be to increase its supply. We do have reserves of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that could easily be tapped into. It is estimated that there are about 7.7 billion retrievable barrels of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a total of 10.3 billion retrievable barrels throughout the entire coastal plain area. Unfortunately it may take many years before this oil is able to be extracted, even if its drilling were approved today.

If only President Bush had thought to propose a bill that would have allowed drilling in the region back in 2002…

Another problem that the new president will have to contend with is the rapidly increasing cost of social security. The baby-boomers have begun to reach retirement age, which means we will have significantly more money flowing out of social security than we have coming in. This is because social security is a pay-as-you-go system, where the taxes of today go to the retirees of today.

One way to help alleviate this problem would be to privatize social security, allowing people to invest their social security money and earn interest on it instead. This way, people would be receiving their own money back, so the pay-as-you-go system would not be such an issue.

If only President Bush had thought to propose partial privatization of social security back in 2001…

The federal government’s debt is growing larger every year as we continue to run a deficit. Our government pays hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year on the interest on this debt. This is largely because of the excessive amount of pork that is attached to most bills. This pork consists of small, unrelated special interest projects that various representatives and senators try to grab for their own districts at the expense of the entire country.

One effective way to fix this would be to give the president a line-item veto. A line-item-veto would allow the president to remove the various pork projects from a bill and then send it back to congress for re-approval.

If only President Bush had thought to demand a line-item veto back in 2006…

The 44th president of the United States will have a lot on his hands next term, thanks to the incompetence of our current president. Thank God we at least had Congress to keep him in line.

Stupid, stupid Bush…

— Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering from De Witt.