Ok... Let's put partisan politics aside and talk about issues

Ok... Let's put partisan politics aside and talk about issues - The Economy Contrast the views of the two candidates regarding The Economy and tell which you favor and why. Asked by YoBob 38 months ago Similar questions: put partisan politics talk issues Economy Politics & Law > Politics.

Similar questions: put partisan politics talk issues Economy.

About the economy... Good reasons for bad politics There are good reasons why American politics are so polarized and partisan. One is that the American political class has lied to the American people so consistently and for so long that neither they nor the people can have an honest conversation about any substantive issue. Another is that most Americans have no idea how things really work.As long as the system appears to be bringing home the bacon (for at least some of the population), the average citizen has no particular incentive to pay attention to what’s going on, much less inform himself with a deep understanding of economics, or fiscal and monetary policy.

Consequently, few Americans have the intellectual warewithal to formulate an independent assessment. A further difficulty is that we are just now coming to the end of a conservative ideology that has been the touchstone of partisan politics, now thoroughly discredited by the excess of the Bush Administration. Palin and Mccain don’t want to talk about it because doing so would reveal just how little they have in the way of new ideas.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to understand the current economic situation without understanding why the old Republican bromides of smaller government, deregulation, and no new taxes have been discredited. Unflattering Truths Nonetheless, there are some illusions held by the bulk of Americans that can not be questioned because doing so leads to unflattering truths that they would prefer to ignore. Americans, for example, have been flattered by both political parties into believing that they are the inheritors of a system of unique and singular genius.

As a result, they tend to believe that their version of capitalism is not only fundamentally sound, but that it borders on a kind of supernatural perfection. Consequently, Americans tend to resist the suggestion that capitalism has deep inherent flaws, much less any analysis that shows how those weaknesses have been exacerbated by bad management. Americans like to believe their economy represents the pinnacle of economic achievement, which they have arrived at because they are virtuous and just, and therefore deserving of a grossly disproportionate share of the world’s economic output.

Naturally, tend to bridal at the suggestion that our prosperity could be an accident of history, or that in recent historywe have lapsed in our virtue so that we now rely on military intimidation, shady dealing and brute force to maintain our standard of living. Americans love to effusively congratulate themselves on the genius of their political system and feel absolutely no shame in holding themselves out as a model worthy of emulation by the rest of the world. Hence, they tend to bristle with incredulity and denial at any suggestion that times may have changed and that America may no longer be the bastion of freedom andl liberty it once was.

Its democracy has been hollowed out by an emerging imperial presidency, assisted by its legislative enabelers and special interest money. Its middle class is in decline due to the predations of the very rich, who seek to establish themselves as a hereditary aristocracy in the new imperial order. Americans have no interest in seeing themselves as anything but a force for good in the world, so consequently, they tend to remain blissfully ignorant of their hisory, particularly the period from the cold war to the present.

Americans see their prosperous standard of living and their access to credit as unlimited and unending. And, they regard this as a kind of entitlement, promised to them in the American Dream. Naturally, the presentation of any evidence that speaks contrary to these claims of virtue is immediately interrupted by uncontrollable scoffing, and snarky suggestions that, perhaps, maybe one should go join Al Qaeda.

As a nation we are ambivalent about becoming an empire, even though we espouse a military doctine of "full spectrum" dominance. On one hand, the ultraconservative neo-cons cycling through governement and think tanks, tell anyone who will listen that America should seize the day and go on a campaign of conquest. They are fully aware that 6% of the worlds population does not consume 40% of the worlds goods and services without an element of coersion.

On the other hand, Iraq and Vietnam have shown us that even small and backward countries can hold thier own against us. Storians tell us that the days of empire are over; nation states can no longer paper over their dysfunctional societies with the appropriated wealth of conquored nations. Moreover, there is a price to be paid--the surrender of our democracy in favor of a more militarized fascist-leaning state.

Nonetheless we have somehow allowed our political class to flatter us into believing that being the world’s only superpower should be easy and largely tax free. Any politician that does not pander to these self-congratulatory delusions is immediately set upon as "un-American" or worse--someone who demands sacrifice--and is punished soundly by the electorate.As a result, our political discourse consists of avoiding issues rather than confronting them. We no longer pay attention to facts and issues, not because they have become irrelevant, but because they lead to unflattering truths would rather not face.

Consequently, we engage in a substitute discourse that seeks to reduce politics to the moralistic assessment of a candidate’s "character." Character and morality have nothing much to do with a leader’s competence; nonetheless, these are things that most people think they understand. So, we tend to nominate and elect candidates who appear to embody our mythology and promise to fulfill it.

One would think that a great calamity, such as the recent stock market meltdown, would cut through this fabric of willful avoidance, but in fact, it raises the stakes.No one dares to suggest to voters that they should have to pay any additional taxes, or suffer the slightest inconvenience, least of all for a crisis they have only been told about but do not yet personally feel. Should any politician indulge in realism, and truthfully lay out the sacrifices to come, the other side will beat him senseless with derision and win the day by making dishonest promises of completely painless solutions. The bailout in context Fortunately, I am under no such constraint.

Since October 9, 2007, the Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, in the past year. That’s $8.33 trillion in paper wealth disappearing out of a $14.175 trillion securities market, the bulk of it in the last 20 days. The $850 billion bailout seems a drop in the bucket compared to what has been lost, but (we hope) it was enough to restore confidence in the system and get banks to start lending again.

The taxpayers are justifyably angry, since they are very unlikely to get anything in return for their money, especially when you consider that $850 billion could have bought us universal health care, balanced the budget, launched a war against cancer, rebuilt all our roads and schools, and funded a couple of Mahattan project for cold fusion. Unfortunately, this $850 billion is as yet unfunded obligation, meaning that although we have commited ourselves to paying for it, we haven’t yet specified in any budget exactly how we are going to pay for it out of a real economy that produces $13.3 trillion GDP per year. This, by the way, is added to several trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations, in an economy that is already in debt to the tune of $56 trillion due to a 25-year run-up in credit card and mortgage debt which has grown, and continues to grow, twice as fast as the real economy.

This crisis, in the words of George Soros, signals the end of an era, since this debt has financed American consumer consumption, which is far in excess of what we produce as a nation. Other countries, notably China, have been lending us money, since this allows us to continue purchasing what they produce. In this respect, American consumer spending has been the engine driving the global economy.

What this crisis has done is call into question the unsustainability of these arrangements, by bringing us to the edge of a credit collapse abyss as the worlds creditors will sit in judgment on our economy as they ponder the likelihood of ever getting paid back. If they should decide that we can not pay them back, they will stop lending to us, causing a liquidity crunch as tens of trillions of dollars evaporate from the world’s economy, sending the whole world economy into a tailspin. It is in our creditors to give us the benefit of the doubt, but this crisis has signalled that we can no longer continue to live beyond our means.

We can no longer be the engine that drives the global economy; which means we will have to reduce our level of consumption--and our standard of living--accordingly. Capitalism’s inherent flaws Our present crisis has its origins in the systemic flaws inherent in capitalism--and the systematic dismantling of the economic policies set in place to correct them in the name of free market fundamentalism. Capitalism is inherently unstable.It is subject to boom and bust cycles, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Government fiscal policy--i.e. , taxing and spending--exerts a countervailing and stabilizing influence on the economy, as taxes withdraws money from an overheated economy preventing inflation in boom times, while government spending injects a demand stimulus which prevents panics from causing recessions and recessions from deepening into depressions. The other systemic flaws in capitalism is that there are no natual limits on how much wealth an individual can accumulate.

As the rich get richer they use their wealth to buy their way into political power, and they use this power to rewrite the laws in such a way as to grant themselves monopolies and other permanent advantages. Over time, the nation’s wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a favored few, who come to feel entitled to further consolidate their wealth and power at the expense of an increasingly pauperized and disenfranchised population. This happened in the 1850s as five robber barons in California fleeced investors in gold mine stocks and used their wealth to buy up all the land, water, livestock, timber, roads, railroads and began charging monopoly rates that literally sucked the life out of the economy, collapsing it completely.

Then again, in 1929 the very rich profited from insider trading, self dealing, market manipulation, collusion, price fixing, cooked books and predatory monopolistic practices, ginning up the trust and unsustainable optimisim that inflated the speculative bubble burst in the Great Crash of 1929. In the absence of laws against fraud, monopoly and self-dealing, there is nothing to constrain capitalists from engaging in organized crime.In this respect, one of the inherent flaws of unregulated capitalism is its tendency toward corruption and inefficency. Perhaps the best example of this is the American health care industry.

America spends $1.1 trillion per year or $6,096 per capita on health care system--more than any country in the world. We love to boast that we have the greatest medical care in the world, and it’s true, but only a tiny elite in the top 1% of the population actually get it. In the second tier are retired people on Medicare and people whose employers provided health insurance.

However, these plans customarily refuse to cover preexisting conditions and are riddled with other exclusions that don’t become apparent until you actually get sick, and the insurer refuses to approve the doctor’s reccomended course of treatment, neccesitating protracted negotiations in order to get the insurer to approve a needed drug, referral, test or surgery. Below this is the barely adequate standard of means-tested Medicaid programs for the medically indigent. This entails an intrusive and humiliating application process calculated to create the hassle-factor that deters people from seeking care.

In this system, more things are not covered than are covered, and the process of getting approvals and waivers is much more adversarial and hassle-prone. Below this is the network of free clinics, family planning clinics, doc in the box clinics, county hospitals and emergency rooms that serve the 45 million people who have no health insurance, no preventative screening for the early detection of disease, and no continuity of care. Most of the system is run "for profit" which means that every pill, bandaid, x-ray, or medical appliance contains a hefty markup that goes into somebody’s private pocket.

Through adroit markups on people who have insurance health care providers can quietly shift the costs of treating people without insurance to people who have insurance. But the arcane complexity of this cost shifting can be employed to fleece everyone. The lack of uniformity from insurer to insurer, and provider to provider makes the system very difficult to audit.

As a consequence, the opportunities for white collar crime are staggering, and apparently irresistable, since it is pervasive. A friend of mine, who used to be an auditor for California’s Medi-Cal program, working with a cumbersome and inadequate computer system nonetheless managed to find scores of different ambulance companies listed under the same owner but at different addresses, or at the same address but under different owners, or different ambulance company name. They would bill Medi-Cal three or four times under different company names, owner names, and dates for the same service, ripping off the state for millions of dollars per month.

Hospitals provide even more lucrative opportunies for the disappearance of large amounts of money. Hospital administrators and cost accountants routinely collude to pull off multi-million dollar rip offs with little or no chance of getting caught. They agree on a designated fall guy in advance who is handsomely rewarded for going to prison and keeping his mouth shut.

Insurance companies provide even more lucrative opportunities to rip off the system. They can buy a drug in bulk at a steep discount and charge Medicare a higher rate by simply misrepresenting their actual cost. The CEOs of major health care providers pay themselves tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in salary, stock options and bonuses.

William McGuire of the United Health Group has a 5-year compensation package of $269.21 million; Edwin Crawford of Caremark Rx has a $161.85 million package, which is enough to run a medium-sized community hospital for a year. Needless to say, people in the health care industry hiss like vampires splashed with holy watar at the suggestion of moving to a single payer system. It’s not the horrors of "socialized medicine" they object to, its the prospect of being brought under uniform accounting and information systems that would greatly facilitate oversight and severely curtail the opportunities for criminal activity that flourish in the dense and tangled underbrush of the current "for profit" system.

Actually, the best run and most cost efficient segment of the American health care system is Medicare, which is a government-run single payer system for seniors--who, as a group, are the healthiest segment of the American population, despite their age. One would expect that paying $1.1 trillion a year for our health care system we should have some of the best health outcomes in the world. The reality is that the United States ranks 42nd, in between Ireland and Trinadad in health outcomes.

This disappointing performance is due to the fact that our health care system is organized to maximize industry profits, not improving health outcomes. Health care companies are in the business of making money, and that means they like to insure healthy people deny coverage sick people and people with complicated health issues. In the 1990s there was a flury of hospital mergers and acquisitions which resulted in huge hospital holding companies who sought to apply factory assembly line efficiency techniques to hospital care.

They brought in accountants who developed automated protocols that deskilled and routinized caregiving so that they could substitute lower skilled and lower paid nurses for higher skilled and higher paid nurses As in any assembly line situation, management could not resist the temptation to speed up the line, resulting in more perfunctory and impersonal and rushed caregiving and extremely stressed caregivers, who tended to make more mistakes. The protocols prescribed services for a statistically average patient but made no allowances for individual variation. If the protocol prescribed a three day hospital stay after a hysterectomy, ready or not the woman would be sent home on the third day, even though 30% of such cases require a longer stay.

The doctors suspected that these protocols were geared more to cost cutting than maximizing health outcomes, but the company was able to successfully thwart any independent peer review of these systems on the grounds that they were proprietary systems.So, essentially, these companies attempted to automate the practice of medicine using experimental protocols which, unlike human doctors, were shielded from any kind of oversight, correction or quality control normally provideded by peer review. The percentage of patients that had to return to the hospital because they were sent home too early increased. The number of infections, medication mistakes, and deaths all increased, even though no specific event could be tied back to a decision made by the protocol.In short, companies were allowed to expose patients to unproven and unvalidated proceedures without any independent oversight, and they were literally able to extract profits out of the hides of their patients because there are no reglatory requiements that these proprietary systems be evaluated.

After the 1929 stock market crash, the New Deal brain trust institued a number of regulatory agencies that would restore investor confidence by removing the opportunities for wealthy people to hatch criminal schemes at the expense of everyone else. The New Deal new regulations required honest and transparent accounting, audited financial statements, truthful and full disclosure of the cash and equity holdings of corporations so that their securities could be realistically valued in terms of their underlying assets. Insider trading, self-dealing, and creating artifical demand were prohibited.

Anti-trust laws prohibited monopolistic practices, such as price fixing, market manipulation, or using one’s wealth to eliminate competition or restrict market share by selling goods below cost. Other regulations set up a firewall between capital lending, investment banking and securities trading, so that the collapse of a speculative bubble in the securities market would not bring down the entire banking system, or destroy confidence in the value of the currency. The Federal Reserve set up reciprocal lending and depositor insurance to reasure depositor that they would get their deposits back even if the bank failed.

Banks, brokerages and insurance companies were required to carry a prudent reserve sufficient to weather a run or a liquidity crunches and other crises so that they justly earned a reputation for stability and fair-dealing even during a crisis. How sub-prime lending got started In the present crisis, many of these New Deal reforms were watered down, abandoned or were simply not enforced by an Administration that was philosophically opposed to any form of regulation. Sub-prime mortgages were not the result of unworthy deadbeats fraudulently obtaining credit they did not deserve.

It was the industry which engaged in fraudlent predatory lending practices. They neglected to explain to elderly or unsophisticated investors how negative amortization could eat up all their equity and turn them out of their homes before they could do anything about it. Loan agents, in hustling people to sign up for what they touted as this easy credit, neglected to explain how you are supposed to prepare for when your baloon payment comes due.

They neglected to explain just how much the borrower might have to pay if their adjustable rate mortgage maxed out. The original lenders neglected to mention that these loans could be resold to unscrupulous companies who might lay a trap for the borrower by sending him a statements that requested only a minimum payment, allowing the unpaid interest to quietly accumulate until it hit a threshold which suddenly triggered the whole note coming due, at which point you would be hustled into refinancing on less favorable terms. When people inevitably got behind in their payments, instead of working things out with them, they reported these "lates" to credit bureaus, ruining their FICO scores and virtually insuring that they could not be able to obtain refinancing.

Once the trap was sprung, the company aggressively rushed to foreclosure in order to capture a windfall in any remaining equity. Unfortunately, this created an avalanch of nonperforming loans which hollowed out the value of the securities that repackaged them. The owners of these securities, being unable to accurately assess their true value began selling them off, starting a panicked rush for the door that destroyed any remaining value they might have represented.

Treasury Secretary Paulson’s first proposal was to use the bailout money to buy up these worthless securities, sticking the taxpayer with the whole mess. But that proved a non-starter as the firestorm of public protest over the bailout forced cooler heads to consider things like replenishing the bank’s capital in exchange for an equity position. This would allow the banks to write off these losses and distribute some of the burden to stock holders.

Replenishing bank capital would provide the reserves necessary to stake for bank lending at 12 times the amount put in. That would restore liquidity and confidence to the markets.It needs to be said that it was the Bush Administration which provided the original impetus for this sub-prime lending debacle, since it was part of Bush’s "ownership society" initiative. This was based on the observation that homeowners tend to become more conservative and vote Republican as the equity in their house increases.

The industry was explicitly encouraged to target blacks in the hope that home ownership would co-opt them and lure them away from the Democratic base. While the Bush Administration didn’t exactly endorse the predatory practices of the industry, he did send them clear signals that the door to the candy store would be unguarded by cutting back staff and funding for the SEC, the Office of the Comptroller, and the other regulatory agencies. To be fair, in 1996, it was the Democrats under the Clinton Administration that dismantled the Glass-Steagall act, and removed the restriction on banks from speculating in the securities markets, so when paper money suddenly vanishes from a bank’s portfolio it parralyzes the bank’s ability to lend until they know how much money thay actually have.

The industry entheusiastically responded by aggressively marketing sub-prime loans to marginal borrowers with low teaser rates and other gimmicks that tended to gloss over the fact that that the adjustable rate mortgages will not always remain low. These loans were presented the loans as an easy hassle free way to get capital necessary to realize the American dream. According to a New York Times study, the industry did target blacks, minorities, and other unsophisticated first time home buyers.

The borrowers were told not worry, any weakness in their credit would eventually be erased by the equity they would accumulate in an ever-rising real estate market. Borrowers had no reason to question this "blue sky forever" assumption since the agent was supposed to be an expert on these matters, and real estate prices had in fact done nothing but increase in living memory. What really set the stage for the current meltdown was that banks and brokerage houses went out hired rocket scientists to work out the the advanced math underlying extremely exotic instruments which were sold to investors who did not understand well enough to correctly value and reglators did not understand well enough to regulate.

They relied on securities rating companies, who rated them AAA without really understanding them either. Some of these instruments contained provided a kind of insurance and a hedge against adversity. And no less than Alan Greenspan praised them as instruments that they would spread the risk and lead to a more stable system.

The people who bought these instruments more or less took all this on faith and loaded up on them.In order get around the statutory requirement of setting aside a prudent reserve to cover the risks inherent in insurance instruments, they decided to call them "swap" instruments instead, and leaveraged themselves to the hilt. Had regulators been actively monitoring the situation, this whole crisis might have been avoided. The candidates and their advisors Traditionally, the Democratic party has been the party of ordinary working people, but it has had to adapt to a media-driven politics charaterized by full-time campaigning and dominated by money.

While it still pays lipservice to the interests of workers, consumers, debtors, this commitment is severely compromised by the exigencies of the full-time scramble for money, where it is much easier to pick the low-hanging fruit of big doners than chase the donations of many small contributors. The Republicans have always been the servants, handmaidens and cheerleaders of the rich, and they are handsomely rewarded for their services, even when they are driven from power in disgrace. Thus, each party’s philosophy and rhetoric is, and will continue to be, shaped by the class interests it work.

As0, if our politics seems polarized and gridlocked by partisan conflict, this is not just some academic difference of philosophy but a reflection of a very real conflict of interests between the middle classes and the rich. Hence, the appeal to "bipartisanship" is a code word that is not so much an offer of peace but as an offer to compromise. The question is, on whose terms?

Like the black mayors who came to power in American cities before him, Obama has to walk a fine line between the interests of the working and middle class people likely to vote for him and the interets of the economic power structure that funds his candidacy. So, like Clinton befor him, he has to adopt a kind of soft "moderate" form of conservativism so as not to appear threatening to monied interests. The situation demands that, at a minimum, he reregulate the financial sector by putting some teeth back into the old New Deal regulatory agencies.

But, despite tough talk about going after fraud in the sub-prime industry (which assumes there still is such an industry) it is extremely unlikely that an Obama Administration will go after any of the industries (e.g. , the oil companies and public utilities) who have grown obscenely rich at the expense of the American people. The legal system is simply too cumbersome, the laws too toothless and the interests too powerful force them to digorge any of their ill-gotten gains. Obama’s main economic advisor, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, was the architect of Clinton’s balanced budget solution to the monumental deficits left by Ronald Reagan.

If the past is any predictor of the future, the economic policies of an Obama will be another round of Rubinomics, which will consist of a moderate reregulation of the economy through enforcement of laws already on the books, a mixture of tax increases (on the wealthy) sufficient to balance the Federal budget and debt reduction financed by a program of fiscal austerity. This show of fiscal prudence is intended to mollify our creditors by showing that we are serious about making the necessary adjustments to live within our means, but it does little to address the deep structural problems of the American economy, such as our abandonment of products that the rest of the world used to buy from work. As1 short, we can expect no New-Deal style public works programs, no massive investment in public infrastructure or attention to the problems of the inner-city, no expansion of social programs, and no universal health care.

Nonetheless, Obama can not stray too far from his Democratic base and its "people before profits" philosophy. For example, Obama is much more likely than McCain to initiate an increase in the minimum wage, perhaps even a living wage, indexed to inflation. Obama is more likely than McCain to extended unemployment benefits if the recession is prolonged, and has already proposed some debt relief for homeowners although at a paltry $550.

He has already proposed extending medical coverage to children, and he may strenthen the social safety net in other ways. Obama is also likely to do something about the artificially high price of oil, which amount to a kind of energy tax imposed on Americans by the oil companies. This will put a lot of money back into the pockets of the middle and working classes, reduce the cost of transportation factored into prices, and generally expand the tax base through expanding the economy.

McCain and Palin, despite their new-found and somewhat phony-sounding populist rhetoric, winking to "Joe Sixpack’s" and railing against "Wall Street fat cats," remain thoroughly committed to the free market fundamentalism traditionally espoused by Republicans. Phil Graham, McCain’s economic advisor is free market ideologue who, has not moved on from the old Republican mantra of smaller government and lower taxes. Last August McCain described the economy as "fundamentally sound," and as recently as his nomination acceptance speech he bragged about his role in deregulating the current economic environment.

Since then sombody must have pulled him aside and told him this is not the best card to play in the current crisis. But I see no indication from either McCain or Palin that either of them sees a problem in the work. As0 fact, Palin went so far as to impugn Obama’s patriotism for dwelling on America’s problems.

McCain’s choice of Graham only underscores how little McCain actually understands about economics, and how unlikely he is to depart from ideology by adoptin fresh new ideas that might enable him to live up to his reputation as a maverick. Palin in particular has repeated the old Republican party line that taxation is theft, that all government is bad, and that the markets, if given enough deregulation will correct their own problems. The undeniable role of deregulation in the sub-prime meltdown and the subsequent stock market crash, are reality’s devastating rebuttal to Republican ideology.

In their debates, all four candidates were asked repeatedly what they would do differently in light of the current economic situation. Only Joe Biden offered the tepid remark that an Obama Administration would have to scale back its goal of doubling foreign aid. But, given the magnitude of the crisis--160,000 people have lost their jobs in August 2008 alone--this is not an answer.

McCain and Palin’s only response has been to attack Obama’s modest proposal to raise taxes on the rich, in the vain hope that painting the Democrats as the "tax and spend" party still carries any credibility. The disconnect from reality that you can pay for an $850 billion bailout without raising taxes is palpably obvious (even though there are still some heavily indoctrinated true believers that are unable to see it). They further underscore their lack of economic ideas, by trying to change the subject.

They have had to resort to tried to change the subject by impuging Obama’s character, even going so far as to question his patriotism by suggesting that he is friendly to terrorists, or that he might be a closet Muslim. One would think that people in glass houses would not throw stones. Anyone active in public life is bound to have an unsavory association or two, and McCain is no exception.

He was one of the Keating 5, a group of senators accused of improperly intervening on behalf of the accused S&L embezzler Charles Keating. McCain was eventually cleared of these charges, but he was criticized for exercising poor judgment, an issue the Obama campaign raises in reciprocating the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama’s character. Making the election about personalities and "character" enables both sides to avoid leveling with the American people the truth about the economy.

It also dumbs down the intellectual discourse, reducing it to visceral hot-button issues. In my view, McCain’s choice of Palin was as his vice presidential running mate was calculated to make the election all about personality, morality and "character," since these are the tools that Republicans use to motivate social conservatives to vote against their economic interests. But this is already too long and that’s another long story.

1 For the most part, Obama is following the Democratic party line of more government involvement. That means more bureaucracy, more taxes (despite his claims), more regulations, more big government. For the most part, McCain is following the Republican party line of less government involvement.

That would seem to reduce the Democratic problems, but with the Congress being run by Democrats right now, it probably won't. The main problem with the economy is not the political parties, however, no matter who is yelling blame at whom. The main problem is greed.

If you've got it you want more and if you don't have it you want the people who do have it to be forced to share. What is missing in a lot of this is the actual history of how many of the rich folk got that way: hard work and wise investing. It paid off.

I'm not talking about CEO's, or movie or sports stars. I'm talking about the 'quieter' rich folk who have worked their respective tails off through the years in order to get somewhere. There really are lawyers who have burned the midnight oil for clients, doctors who have gone the extra mile (our son's dentist comes to our home to clean his teeth because that is where Chris can handle it -- he is profoundly retarded).

These people have gone to years of school and paid off their debts and turn around and serve others. But there is another problem with the middle class -- we fall for advertising. We MUST have this, SHOULD have that, and credit cards make it so easy!

If you can charge it, why not have it? Pay off the debt? Oh, don't worry about that.

You can always get another credit card....If we lived within our means, as individuals and then as a nation, there would be no economic problem. But after WWII, when Truman (a Democrat) had the chance to pay off all our debts, he didn't. He expanded public entitlements, increasing the national debt.It has never been clear since, no matter which administration has been in office.

However the facts of the matter are that the Democratic Congresses pass more spending bills than the Republican congresses. And because this money that isn't really there seems to be available to various groups and individuals, everyone wants a share. Forget working for it.

Go for the government handout. If we can't get a grip on ourselves, how can we blame anyone else for our troubles? Yes, of course there is greed at the top.

But if we lived within our means, that wouldn't be affecting each of us individuals so much, would it? Then Congress or whomever could go after those greedy folks at the top and prosecute or regulate them without the entire economy dropping through the bottom -- BECAUSE WE WOULD ALL BE OK. Yes, a lot of retirement funds would drop, but suppose we actually did something else bizarre?

Suppose we looked out for one another in our own towns? It's a radical thought, an old-fashioned idea, but it worked for years before entitlements and it can work now. We can take responsibility for ourselves instead of blaming, forever, someone else.

For the most part, Obama is following the Democratic party line of more government involvement. That means more bureaucracy, more taxes (despite his claims), more regulations, more big government. For the most part, McCain is following the Republican party line of less government involvement.