Why does the business cycle work? It changes all the time, and like any cycle, it always ends where it started. But how? The four parts of the business cycle in order are expansion, peak, recession, and trough. It works because the amount of money the country produces is limited, and affected by so many different things that you could study it your whole life without ever having a full understanding. When we are in a period of expansion, as much as we can want it to continue, it can almost be compared to the weather because every sunny day can only last so long before the occasional cloud rolls through. But like the weather, we can predict almost precisely what the next day will look like. However, some days will always surprise us with something we never would have expected.

     Gross Domestic Product, better known as GDP. GDP is a way of measuring the well-being of our economy. It can be calculated by taking the sum of Investment, Consumption, Government Purchases, and Net Exports. What the GDP does not account for is the underground market for products like drugs, weapons, stolen cars, etc. GDP is not perfect because of this, and also its inability to measure overall happiness in people's lives. Although it has these flaws, GDP is still the best way to measure our economy.

          Is GDP a good measure of a country's economic well being? I think so. To start, GDP is measured by the sum of a country's personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, government purchases, and net exports. This covers the majority, if not all, of the factors of our economy. That being said, is GDP a good measure of our economic well being? Of course! GDP basically IS our economy, so of course it would have a big part in our country's economic well being.

Greed. Is it really so bad? While being one of the seven deadly sins, greed is a motive that implies self gain and cheating others out of any positive gain. In reality, greed can actually help everyone if looked at from a different perspective. For example, think about Bill Gates. While being the richest man in the world, he has opened job opportunities that would have never been there without him creating Microsoft. He may have much more money than he needs, but he also has given people the opportunity to make a living. Just because he makes so much money does not mean he took it from anyone, if anything he has created one of the most successful, constantly expanding companies that will live on after he is gone to provide people with more jobs and profit for themselves.

     Shutting down the government. How unbelievably childish. How can we depend on a government that would so readily create such a chaotic situation over a minuscule conflict like the slight changes in Obamacare. The democrats like it how it is, but the conservative republics feel it would be better to amend Obamacare to a slightly more conservation minded program. Apparently all negotiation failed, and we now find ourselves without all government facilities running such as libraries, museums, and historical monuments. We can only hope that the senate and the house come to a consensus on this as soon as posible, and end this frustrating conflict.