"As the nation approaches its 57th Presidential Election, we're asking the future leaders of this country, students, to define the single most important political issue in this election."

The single most important issue facing this country in my opinion is the economy. We all are suffering from this retched state of affairs; some people are jobless and are losing their homes while others are having to cut back significantly on things, being thankful just to still have jobs. As a student, the economy is an important issue because when I graduate I will have a mountain of debt and if I cannot find a job, no way to pay it off. I, like many older college students, decided to go back to school in an effort to gain knowledge and skills that would make myself more marketable to employers. When I started school, the economy had not yet tanked. Watching the economic practices of this country make the situation in this country worsen over time has me alarmed as well as most Americans.

Every candidate is promising to create jobs, but no one is being realistic as to what it will take in order to do this. As a nation, we have to stop borrowing money we cannot repay or selling bonds we cannot buy back to raise money to fund our government, our military, or anything else the politicians already in office want to spend it on. We absolutely have to balance this budget and begin to pay the deficit down. Partisanship and politics need to be put aside for the good of the people. If we can straighten the economy out and pay the deficit down, the economy will come out of this recession and jobs will be created. 

There are many ways in which we can cut the deficit and create jobs, and one of them is to bring our military home from both Iraq and Afghanistan. A fighting force is easier and more cost effective to run with our soldiers at home or in places where there is no conflict. Close and secure our border with Mexico by taking some of those soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and placing them along the border to patrol it. Guns and drugs find their way across the Mexican/American border but this would be less likely to be a problem if we had seasoned, trained security to patrol this area, which is a little over 1,900 miles long. Our current border patrol is not funded well enough to deal with these problems.

We need to stop sending monetary aid to countries that do not want anything to do with us besides take our money. We currently send millions in aid each year to Pakistan, a country that clearly does not support our efforts to quell terrorism. Pakistan is infamous not only for not sharing intelligence with us about terrorists like Osama bin Laden but also for harboring these criminals and the organizations they belong to. We send countries like Pakistan money in an effort to try and buy cooperation from them; the politicians who are in charge now apparently do not see that the Pakistanis give us what information they want us to have. I realize that things have to be done in order for our country to be safe and that we may not always agree on what those things are, but it is apparent that sending money to countries where we are so hated is not working.

I would like to close by saying there is no one trick to fixing the economy. Tough decisions have to be made and there has to be follow through. It is up to us as United States Citizens to hold our policy makers accountable for their actions by voting them in and out of office.

This is an official blog entry for the YourLocalSecurity.com Blogging Scholarship. If selected, I'll receive $1000 towards my college expenses in 2012. This scholarship is sponsored by YourLocalSecurity.com