Guess, what? It’s STILL the economy, stupid…

About 16 years ago, a brilliant man said “it’s the economy, stupid” and began a campaign to unravel the presidency of someone who I will refer to as B1. B1 paid attention to all sorts of foreign policy issues, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end the Cold War and created others, such as the Persian Gulf War. What he failed to do was address important domestic policies in a time when the country was struggling to get out of a recession. It feels almost like déjà vu, but today, we have another president, B2, who has created and helped further havoc and chaos on the world stage by starting wars, destabilizing regions, tumbling the economic markets and destroying what was left of domestic tranquility by turning our budget surplus into a deficit of over $50 TRILLION DOLLARS (a number so large that even the nimblest economist has trouble fathoming the length of time it will take us to get out of this muck).

B2, governmental appointees, elected officials and their collective knowledge bases when coupled with all of these modern day plagues, have helped create the environment for a perfect storm that could result in an economic meltdown of the world financial markets. Not to preach doom and gloom, but right now, America and the economy has been bushwhacked, bamboozled and led astray. Our politicians are struggling with ways to change what seems to be our ever expanding debt and economic trouble. Unemployment is up, the financial markets are down, foreclosures are up, savings are down…look, I could go on and on with my ups and downs (all of which are negative), but I presume my readers are getting the gist of what I am saying. We are going through some stuff and I believe that it will get worse before it can get better.

Now here is where I get to ranting -- the $700 BILLION DOLLAR economic package recently passed by Congress is just a small percentage of the U.S. deficit, and some would ask, what’s the big deal? The big deal is that we, the American taxpayers cannot afford another penny, that’s what. We are footing the bill by spending more than $10 billion dollars a month (which in case you are wondering, this works out to approximately $2.4 billion dollars a week, more than $340 million dollars a day, $14 million dollars an hour and $238,425 a minute) in Iraq when that country has a budgetary surplus (guess they are smarter than us because we are footing the bill for their government and infrastructure when they have money and we do not…we can only hope that China will be as benevolent when it comes time for us to repay some of the money we owe them). We are losing our homes. Our 401k accounts are in the shrinking at an alarming rate and for those who have retired or hope to retire in the next 3-5 years, they do not have the time to wait for the economy bounce back. Our children are having a more difficult time getting student loans, so they are cannot afford an education in order to get a job, which is somewhat moot anyway since unemployment is up. Our savings are non-existent. We are losing our jobs. Our credit cards that we relied on to help bridge the gap between what we brought in and what we needed have dried up. The big deal is that the majority of Americans are catching hell. And, let me add a bit of a qualifier to my previous statement. I realize that many believe that there are some Americans who will not feel the effects of this economic down turn because they are have money to burn, however, it is one thing to burn your own money and quite another for some CEO to burn it for you.

It’s STILL the economy and our economy is teetering on the brink. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Recession is natural, depression is not. If we can just have our politicians and their appointees do sensible things and make the necessary changes in budgetary spending, we can emerge as a better, stronger America. However, we need a change and we cannot afford to wait because it would just be stupid to do so…