Americans are too greedy.

Child Care My first argument is about having children. People have children for a few reasons. Some want children there to take care of them in old age, some do it because they have so much love to give, while others do it because they want to pass on their name. Now, I don’t count any of those as greedy. What I do think is greedy, is the timing. According to a poll conducted by mumsonline (1), 46.34% of the people had unplanned children. Thenationalcampaign.org (2) states one in two pregnancies were unplanned. So, how do people end up with a child they didn’t care to have? That’s the greedy part. People want to have sex when the action is meant for reproducing. That is defined as excessive. According to guttmacher.org (3) , seven of ten women (in reproductive age) are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant. This in itself is greedy. Why are unplanned children bad for society, and in turn “too greedy”? According to childwelfare.gov (4), the amount of children leaving foster care in 2009 was 276,266. The median time spent in care, 13.7 months. Charlotte Weldon wrote an article (5) on what happens to children in long term foster care. Many of these children don’t move on to more productive lives. In other words, they end up living off the system, which is a drain. Personal Items Everyone wants to be well off, but what is well off? In order to live in our society, you need food shelter, and clothing. How many people work for just that? I’ve met two people in the Peace Corp that’s as close as you can get. I say close because they are not in it anymore. But I don’t really think of wanting more than basics as excess. What is excess? Buying more than you can afford, beyond the minimums, is what I consider excess. Americandebtadvisor.com (6) states 25% of adults owe thousands of dollars, not including car or mortgage loans. Is this due to greed? According to a shopsmartmag.org (7) poll, women own an average of 17 pairs of shoes. In 2009, a Nielsen poll (8) states the average household has 2.86 TV’s. My wife bought clothes she will never wear. Some searching on Google shows she is far from the only one. Unfortunately I cannot get specific numbers for America, but the UK had a poll and over 90 percent of their women have clothes with a tag still on it. Along with asking several females I know, it’s safe to say the numbers are not much different in the USA. This is just a few of the many examples of people buying things they don’t need or use. How is this bad for society? Shopping stimulates the economy, right? I’ll agree it does, but as we saw in the housing market crash, shopping too much can be a bad thing. If everything is selling like hot cakes, by using credit, what happens when people stop paying that money back? People bought things they eventually could not pay for, so creditors lost money. What happens when they lose money? They don’t accept a really low profit, they fire people. Now more people can’t pay their debts. And the credit tower comes tumbling down. The housing market is the perfect example. It affected everyone, including those that don’t own houses. Business Greed How many businesses are out there to make a small profit? I can’t think of any. This is in part, due to the personal greed of people mentioned above. Everyone wants their business to make more money than needed to run and keep themselves in a more than comfortable lifestyle. The only exception is non-profit organizations, which often still cater to upper management “employees”. The stock market is one of the worst cases of American greed. We buy pieces of a company in hopes it will not just make money (paying flat rate dividends), but will actually increase in value more and more. That way we can sell it and get rich quick. Why is all of this bad? Companies have to cater to these stockholders / owners, meaning profits cannot fall. Even if they are still profitable, but their amount of profit goes down, they often fire people to make up for it or send the jobs overseas to pay people less. That ties in to personal greed, because we want more pay for the things we want. If you need an example of why people being fired in mass is bad, do some research on Detroit in the last few years. Sources (1) http://www.mumsonline.net... (2) http://www.thenationalcampaign.org... (3) http://www.guttmacher.org... (4) http://www.childwelfare.gov... (5) http://www4.samford.edu... (6) http://www.americandebtadvisor.com... (7) http://www.shopsmartmag.org... (8) http://blog.nielsen.com...