Crazy Gamer becomes the Crazy Historian

I apologize that today's post is not gaming related.  Once upon a time the Crazy Gamer studied a lot of history and occasionally my love of history overwhelms my better judgment and so I post something like this. 

Don't worry though game lovers, I have three Warhammer articles and three video game articles in the works (you'll never guess my take on the Xbox 1) but those are for a later day. 

Today is about history! 

I live in the United States of America.  Like all countries the world over the US has its share of problems and I am going to type about two.  The first problem is this countries crumbling infrastructure.  We have unsafe bridges, bad roads, dams that are at their structural limits, to say nothing of the fact that their are many buildings both public and private that are way below modern code.  Why isn't anything done about it?  It's easy, there isn't any money, and sadly that isn't going to change anytime soon. 

Another problem the US has, and we aren't the only country that has this problem, are banks that are too large to fail.  This, of course, isn't what our government says about banks, but it certainly is what our government's actions are making clear. 

About now you may be asking, "What do these two things have to do with each other, and why are you bringing them up?"

Let me explain.  While reading, think about how our country could be very different today if but for one thing. 

If you asked the average American they would not be aware that once we had a national bank (well we had two actually but this blog is about the second bank) called the Bank of the United States.  It was the repository of all government funds and it was responsible for collecting money and paying debts for and to the United States.  Could you imagine how much easier to figure out where tax payer money went to if there was only one place that was responsible for  paying the governments debts?

Still, this isn't what I wanted to talk about.  A guy by the name of Henry Clay (a member of the House of Representatives when he proposed this, but at other times he was a Senator, and the Secretary of State) who was a Democratic Republican (nope, I didn't make a mistake that was a party.  I'm going to giggle at right and left wing nuts trying to decide if they should hate Clay or like him based on his party).

Anyway, he proposed that a special fund be created from the interest earned on the money kept in the bank (billions of dollars in todays money) be used solely for the purpose of internal national improvements.  Pretty cool huh?  Imagine every year hundreds of millions of dollars for internal improvements on the items listed above and none of it would need to come from the national or state budget!  Alas it was not to be.  James Monroe vetoed that plan even though he did agree to the Bank of the United States.  Jackson would kill the bank in the 1830's, and here we are today, we have private banks that are a law unto themselves and we have no money to fix the infrastructure of our country.  If only things could have been different...