The Great RecessionIn 1929 the United States faced the onset of the Great Depression. When the final bell rang on Wall Street on what became known as “Black Tuesday,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 13% and the next day fell another 10%. This was the beginning of one of the worst decades in U.S. history. Over the next four years, unemployment will rise dramatically from 3% to 25%. Across the country, citizens faced the fear of economic uncertainty and the onslaught of poverty. Americans today face similar economic uncertainty. One of the biggest challenges for the United States is the struggling economy. Since the beginning of 2002 the United States of America has begun an economic recession that has left many uncertain about what will happen. There are many variables in this economic equation, and the U.S. government has difficulty determining how to prioritize these variables to produce the most effective results. The economic situation is like that of a patient who arrives at the hospital after having been stabbed twenty times and bleeding from multiple wounds. Wounds must be accessed and prioritized for treatment to be effective. The United States is bleeding money from internal wounds like a crippled Social Security program and an insolvent Medicare system. These wounds are the result of inadequate funding and misuse of funds over the past decades. As for external wounds, these can be attributed to deficit spending and the government's attempt to manipulate the natural ebb and flow of a free market economy. This has proven to be a toxic combination for the American economy which may not be able to recover from its period of crisis, with paper racking up debt to keep the economy afloat, the government is simply digging a deeper hole . The current level of spending is unsustainable. At the end of this spending deficit, the population will feel the pain of having to try to get out of the huge hole created by public spending. As a result of this lethal economic mix, the United States economy is on the verge of collapse. If the US government continues on this unsustainable path of unfunded liabilities and deficit spending, it could lead to the end of the American democratic experiment. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Error of opinion can be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” It seems that reason has abandoned the minds of those in power within the United States government and their error of opinion could be the downfall of one of the greatest nations in history.