You are right— a game is being played with our ecomonic health. Truman, Ike, JFK, would not have played it this way. But they were statesmen, not merely pols.

I hope people will stop looking to the government for solutions. Our Founders had a healthy skepticism of it–people (like Reid and Dodd and Bush and Corker), if given too much power, act to their own aggrandizement, rather than benefitting their nation. We have given way too much power to government under the BUsh term and it scares the heck out of me. Government has grown too powerful–when it can write checks totalling $7.4 trillion and not say who gets the money, and decide which industries will fail and which will be propped up, our liberty is in grave danger.

It is the worker, the guy that bolts the wheel on the car, the engineer, the lady that deisgns an engine, the salesperson, the guy that works at your local dealer, that makes our economy work. I am tired of seeing those folks trampled on. For no fault of their own, the working and professional people in the US are getting the shaft–largely because of the decisions of an out of touch government, and a few bad business leaders.

Corporations market and build things, the things we need and want–to my knowledge Congress has never invented or created anything I want to buy or can’t live without. Congress should stick to what we need–defense, making sure food isn’t adulterated, making sure the water isn’t poisoned, making sure the mail gets delivered. Other than that, stop trying to control the economy and stay out of the way.

It’s all so short-sighted and frustrating. They’re playing ideology games with our country’s economic life and the people are standing around making dinosaur comments and slamming the UAW and arrogant executives.

Now they’re playing idiotic games with banks again. Reminds me of those insane health savings plans – no, we can’t give you a simple tax deduction, we need to route everything through insurance companies so we can maximize the administrative costs and take your money away if you don’t plan perfectly. Now we’re back to “we’ll take the risk and banks will get the profits.”

At this point, I think the Democrats’ wisest move would just be to give up. Forget about it. GM and Chrysler will be forced into bankruptcy one way or the other if we take this plan. At least it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers any more than the $250 billion or so we’ll pay for unemployment and extra cops and repairing the damage from the riots.

Regulation isn’t what got us into this mess; I realize the Detroit leaders like to say it is, but I can’t agree. All companies have to follow the same regulations. I believe there are numerous issues, including fair trade issues, health insurance, etc., etc. It all comes together; no one thing was to blame. For that matter, each company has its own problems. GM has gigantism and had a corrupt internal culture; Ford (I won’t get started); and Chrysler had Daimler. Without Daimler, I have NO doubt that Chrysler would be taking full advantage of Ford and GM’s travails today.