Sir;... I think the big personal salvation for the American people is Credit.... Certainly they have been forced to buy on credit and to live on credit as wages and production were driven down in this country, but the government has resorted to credit because it could not find the political will to tax the rich...Now that their house of cards is shaking and quaking, you say borrow and spend... Upon what equity old man??? Because the wealth has been taken out of this people, and the sole wealth upon which people have borrowed has dropped below its price.... One thing might save this country for a time, and that would be to take it out of the rich who got it from us; but what they have here, and can cash out, does not reflect all they own in foreign lands that we will never see again... But, if we have a chance to borrow, everyone should borrow the max, and buy what they can, for this reason: If they cannot pay the money back they can go bankrupt, (which the rich never fail to resort to -to cheat the workers, and other creditors) and have the use of the goods in the meantime. .. But if the government continues to borrow money from the Chinese, and does not tax the rich, then it will not save our economy, and it will ruin our money, and this means that anyone with debts can pay them off with paper legal tender that may be only worth the paper... If the Chinese see the government killing itself with borrowing, they will spend all the dollars they can as fast as they can on buying up and exporting our factories to China... And they should; because the more the government borrows without the ability to pay -the more shaky the dollar becomes, and if the government borrows too much, the man with debt may get some freebies, but we are all going to hurt, most of all, the government which will have to spend the last of its social credit enforcing legal tender... All our international power is going to crumble with the dollar... We have always bought people so we would not have to kill them... And we have sold a lot of people on the idea of international capitalism that does not work, even for the handful of capitalists who actually benefited short term...Thanks...Sweeney

Re: Earmarks. Patrick: The first few paragraphs were right on. Then you revert to the economics you learned at the John Birch society and Ar Lffler. Big govt can do no worse than BIG BUSINESS. We are here because of the FREE MARKET ECONOMY. We did not know that the FREE was only for larcenous CEOs, genius MBAs and MIT physicistsd all intent on devising the best Ponzi plan ever seen. This one, by BIG BUSINESS, is a feat for Guiness and Ripley. You always see the heart of an issue and generally come up with the worst remedy. You are one of the best casuists I have ever read. That could be taken as a compliment.

"And, though the Bush deficits are said to have been responsible for our troubles, a new Congress and president have advanced a deficits-be-damned, full-spending-ahead policy." Oh, Byuke, you old dog, you were doing so good there for a while, but now you've lost the scent of the trail again. Get your nasty snout off of that old dead rat and try to sniff your way back to reality. ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

The deficits-be-damned, full-spending-ahead policy is what we've had to live through for 8 long years now, you dope. But you forgot to add in the part about the giveaway of all our hard-earned tax dollars to those filthy rich gambling fools at the top of the tax bracket at the very same time time Bush was flushing the whole thing down the toilet. We have no choice but to try to spend our way out now that we have a legitimate need to do so. Thanks to Bush and carrion-loving enablers like you we have nothing to spend precisely when we need it. It is not Obama's fault that we need bridges, roads, trains, bullet trains, schools, houses to live in, etc., etc., and if we don't spend on those we may as well head back to the caves. You can't deprive us of these things just because you threw all the rreal money away (OUR money, to be precise) and left us with nothing but a printing press. You get revolution and chaos when you try to take these things away, and you should be thanking your lucky stars the voters were wise enough (wiser than you, I might add) to elect someone with enough smarts to have a decent shot at getting us out of this mess.