Short Term Gain Means Long Term Pain

I defend the motion « Short term gain means long term pain »

Dear members of the jury, dear members of the opposition:

First, let us not think about all the economic, politic, health subjects where we can prove the truthfulness of the statement.

• The behaviour of human beings in general:

- The lack of happiness that people feel in our new societies induces people to seek immediate comfort in material goods, drugs, and activities and lifestyles that eventually cause them, and their societies, great harm, ill health, and massive debt!

- In fact, to provide happiness and make life more bearable people in many developed countries consume drugs (legally and illegally) in extraordinary amounts. These drugs often create dependencies that impair health, brain and psychological functioning. These dependencies then lead to greater crime to support drug habits, increase prison populations and criminal/legal costs, raise the number of accidents everywhere, and encourage unhealthy lifestyles that in turn produce epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and all manner of health problems.

- In 2008, Economic crisis was caused by mortgage securities that were sold to people incapable of paying back their debt. People were so seeking immediate goods (houses in our example) that they forgot about long term perspectives (paying back their debt with interest in our example).

Let us move on to some economic data that proves the motion:

• Economically speaking

- One way of stimulating the economy after 2008 crisis was again to issue more and more debt . U.S. government debt currently totals around $16 trillion. The Treasury estimates that this debt will rise to around $20 trillion by 2015, over 100% of America’s Gross Domestic Product.

- In europe we are not doing any better: Governments are always seeking short term gains, reflected by GDP growth. This led to the greek sovereign debt crisis

- In France : One short term solution to french weak competitiveness would be to allow foreign capitals, but in long term wouldn’t it mean that France would be somewhat owned by theses foreign capitals resulting in a new type of colonisation?

- Among public companies a short term focus on near term profits that potentially create longer term costs and debt has been endemic: the US automobile industry preferred to spend profits on supporting their near term stock prices rather than developing new products for longer term profits. By 2009 all but Ford were bankrupt. After losing tens of thousands of jobs and engaging in a massive automobile industry-restructuring program, the US government bailed out the industry at a cost of about $85 billion.

- we’ve also been seeking fossil energy in the last fifty years, which led in a sense to a short term gain represented by an easy access to energy. In fact this caused a growing emission of greenhouse effect gases, which led to an accelaration of climate change.

• What about Health?

- We spoke about drugs problem, we shouldn’t forget tobacco’s as well.

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