my thoughts on who is best prepared to dig us out of the very deep hole in which we find ourselves… in my mind it is not who but what. what we have to be prepared to do is ‘bite the bullet.’ this means control gov’t spending, control waste, and reduce the amount of fuel we consume. on who: it is going to take someone committed to doing the right thing. this person and i believe that this is obama. will have to have the guts, fortitude, character, and strength to do the ‘right’ thing… not the easy thing. it will require the cooperation of the congress. yes, it will cost more initially to get us back on our feet, but it takes money to make money. removing the tax breaks on the wealthy will generate some, removing the cap on ss and increasing the retirement age will strengthen social security; but more importantly ending the war will stop the bleeding and keep us from going further into the pit. a new wpa program would create jobs. these jobs will be geared toward improving our infrastructure[our highways and bridges are in a sad state of repair, as are our schools.] creating incentives for green energy alternatives will create more jobs. discouraging companies from going offshore by removing the loopholes that encourage same; and maybe even tariffs on the finished product when they ‘import’ them into the country. tax breaks and incentives in order to keep companies that are here, here in the u.s. in order to stabilize our downward spiraling economy people must have jobs in order to buy the goods, houses, automobiles, and other products produced here. as someone once said about money… “give it to the poor people… they’ll spend it.” one thing that hurts us in the global economy is the high cost of our health care relative to other countries. socialized medicine is a large part of it. i don’t know the answer but i do know that the cost of health insurance to business is a huge part of what keeps us from being able to keep jobs at home and competitive on the world stage.

From Harper’s Weekly, by computer, a summation of events around the world - this was one sentence, “C3, the firmthat developed Disneyland, announced plans to build a $500 million amusement park in Baghdad.” It gives the word “internecine” an astonishing urgency.

It seems to me that legislators must be taking some huge huge contributions from a lot of large companies, including oil companies, banks, insurance companies, etc., thus not passing laws to curtail certain rising costs. USA is the third largest oil producing country in the world but yet our gas prices continue to rise at an incredible rate. It seems we are buying our own oil at huge prices through OPEC….what a joke. The credit card debt goes up and up, with a very large percentage of that due to the enourmous interest percentages credit card issuers are allowed to charge. Why don’t legislators enact restraints…..no way….and in fact they changed bankruptcy laws so the banks wouldn’t lose so much money. Another joke. And health insurance costs are out of sight. I just read where health care increased 30% while salaries of the American public increased 3%. Something is not right in America. Write your congressman every month to complain. I think I have ticked mine off. He no longer sends the required response that the congress site says will be sent when a complaint is received.

I know it sounds simplistic, but one of the causes of the current recession is loss of confidence ( otherwise known as fear). I think Obama is the one most skillful at lifting people’s spirits, making them hopeful, and inspiring them to give more to the effort of themselves, even if it means sacrificing, to make this country great again. Americans can cut back and do without, as they did in WW II homefront America, if they have someone like Roosevelt who explains the great cause to them. Fundamentally Americans have to learn to save and conserve again, instead of spending beyond their means and going into debt.

[Sally Smith - 4/28/2008 3:30 PM : No, not really! No matter how good they are it would take at 2-4 terms to get us out of this mess! Only a willing Congress and a Pro Active President would do! … Sally Smith - 4/28/2008 11:19 PM: ……but I believe that Clinton left us in a surplus, we can do it again! We can only pray and hope we can get the Clintons back in the White House for our children’s sake! or may God have mercy in our souls!!!!!] I have to agree with this position. Many candidates talk about fiscal responsibility, but when it comes to getting down to business, the only person in recent history that actually did anything about it was Bill Clinton. I don’t know much about their marriage, or their collaborative efforts in the White House, but I honestly believe Hillary was by his side working on the same things he did. I suspect that she did much more than we know. I doubt she would ever admit to most of it because she wouldn’t want to diminish Bill’s list of accomplishments. Between the two of them, however, we can clearly see who is the most ‘hands on’. Hillary has never said she would eliminate the deficit, but then how could she? It’s so big, it won’t be possible for a long time (2-4 terms as suggested above). It would be outrageous for anyone to make such a claim at this point. However, to promise to reduce it by, let’s say, half might be more reasonable. Personally, I believe that Hillary knows the pressure she would be under to reduce/elimate the debt if she were elected. I believe she understands her election will carry with it the implied mandate to take on this problem by virtue of the way the debt was eliminated during the time they were in the White House. I’m worried that Obama and McCain don’t feel this burden in the same way she does – that perhaps they may feel they only need to keep things as they are instead of seriously lowering the debt. One quality about Hillary that stands out to me is her holistic approach to creating solutions. She always looks at the complete picture. My impression of McCain and Obama is that they offer more tokenistic proposals without regard for where the other chips may fall. I have never got the feeling from them that they understand you have to take a little from one place to put a little somewhere else. I feel Hillary is capable of knowing how much she can take from one place and move it to another while, at the same time, keeping the whole thing in balance without harming any one sector too much. I just think she gets it: us, our kids - all of it.

Obama can. He can get some of the [pseud-undeserved]-respect back. Why undeserved, because during the last 150 years, we have invaded/meddled in the internal affairs of the countries that dared to rise against English/our-puppets.

It will take another 8 yrs of Democratic leadership to dig (partially) out of the hole. And just as things begin to look up, it will switch back to Republican rule and we’ll go into debt again. The pendulum swings.