Determining my junior theme

I am currently considering two possible directions for my Junior theme. The first involves an examination of american consumerism and the USA's materialistic values. I will try to answer the following question: why is american society so motivated by materialistic gain? Though the question may need to be defined more specifically, answering this question will require examining, among other things, the history of the USA pre and post the second world war and the changes in philosophies the USA underwent. I will look at the 'american dream': the dream of rising from humble to wealthy that is supposedly the defining dream of american citizens, and examine reasons for its purely materialistic nature.

The other possibility I am considering for my Junior theme entails examining the causes of the USA's current economic crisis. Although the answer is seemingly obvious: too much was borrowed leaving the country in great debt, I will look at the government's tax policies and main areas of spending which drove it to borrow so much. In doing so I would hope to answer why the USA is in its current economic situation. The weakness of this topic as aJunior theme question is that the historical scope is small. At the end of Clinton's administration, the USA's economy had a surplus, and so the reasons for the economic crisis can be traced back only to the beginning of the Bush administration, which was for the most part responsible. One way to overcome this shortcoming for my Junior theme might be to examine the USA's history of debt and borrowing as a whole, and compare it with the actions of George Bush's administration in more recent years.