From where I sit the economy is still heading into a fiscal disaster. That remains true even if the profits of our larger corporations and their production is higher than it was a year ago. The reason that is true is my income is one third of what it was two years ago, and headed toward zero if the small business that it depends on doesn't pull its nose up. Of course the likelihood of that happening is small unless the market for high end computer memory systems improves dramatically. Personal pain aside I fail to see how most of the families that have no breadwinner are going to get through a second winter with the fuel prices that people are paying today. The major contribution of the Bush Administration is to the Oil Gas and Coal companies that supported their campaign last time and will again. Their profits are up and their environmental costs are down. FERC, (A misnomer for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is a misnomer for a toothless hissing cockroach of a government agency), decided to let the energy trading companies that stole ten Billion or more from California taxpayers off with a kiss on the back of their hand. That means that deregulation which cost California a total so far of forty Billion Dollars is working I guess. Things are getting better and prosperity must be just around the corner too huh?

I am trying not to be bitter about the facts of life as I see them at sixty but sometimes that is hard when I hear platitudes out of the mouth of the fools that are creating a disaster for our nation. I include in that pack of fools the last four administrations and leave out the fifth only because I can't remember back that far. The endless exporting of jobs to places where people have to work for a dollar a day when they are lucky enough to have a job is draining our economy of its vitality. It has not noticeably improved the lot of the new workers, who are cast aside as soon as there are people who will work cheaper elsewhere. In the search for ever cheaper labor we have lost track of the fundamental fact that consumers need jobs.

Gains in productivity are great when they bring gains in income to the middle and lower classes. They are hollow when the basis of our economy, the worker, is neglected. Our economic base is eroding and that will not help my kids and grandkids pay off the national debt which is headed toward ten trillion dollars. Just servicing the interest on that monster will take between five hundred billion and one trillion dollars a year. That money will have to come from the depleted incomes of our nation's workers and investors in less than ten years. When you pile on top of that princely sum the forty four trillion dollars that comprise the unfunded needs of the retiring baby boomers you have a fiscal disaster of unheralded proportions. The taxes needed to pay these disastrous sums would bankrupt the world economy, much less our own. But things are getting better, the President says so.

I will hit sixty this year and that is a time when you inevitably look back on life and wonder "what if" a little. What if the people of this nation got it when Reagan and Bush I were creating the trillions in national debt that are hanging around our necks today and just said NO? What if the people of this nation were really persistent about their disapproval of NAFTA and other pieces of noxious legislation that drained jobs from this nation and just said NO! What if the People of this great nation lost their patience with the lies that we are told about this becoming a post-industrial economy and just said NO! What if those who led us into this mess were more honest and told us the truth about their agendas for international peace and prosperity. That may have gotten them lynched but would have served this nation better in the long run. Internationalism is fine when it costs you your job, but what if it cost them theirs? We would certainly be better off in this nation if our industrial base had not been exported to nations where workers and the environment are more easily exploited.
I have twenty or thirty years of life left, my grandchildren may have ninety or more. I worked a lot of years to help their parents reach a life that is good and desirable. So far I have also lived a life that was interesting from the inside and fun a lot of the time. I could wish no more for them but the truth is that they could be strapped to an economy and government that are needlessly bankrupted by my generation's retirement. We need a prosperous planet but the way to get there is not to break the bank in the one economy that leads the world in middle class living. Our nation was poor when I was young and we worked our way out of that with help from government programs. Programs that were designed to make the government a support mechanism for the middle class growth that we experienced. There is a lot more wealth in the world today than there was when I was young. But we have abandoned program after program and policy after policy that helped create that wealth in favor of programs and policies that further concentrate wealth at the top. Finally we have passed tax decreases that will impoverish future generations and may destroy our economy totally if they are left in place. Tax decreases that were passed based on a lie about economic growth that is already apparent to those of us who earn our living creating jobs and starting businesses.

I have no resentment of the wealthy people in our nation. By all standards of wealth I am so much richer than my parents that any comparison is ridiculous. But we all need to take a look at what we are doing in the light of what it means to our future generations. Things are not getting better! The fools, damn fools and liars that lead us cannot establish such a lie as the basis for truth without hurting all of us. I am supporting Howard Dean not because of his stance on Iraq but because he knows how to balance a budget! I would vote for a Republican that convinced me that they wanted to balance the national budget just as likely. The Reagan and Bush I tax cuts funded the stock market bubble that cost us seven trillion dollars in equity drop over two years. Wealth was destroyed faster during that period than at any time prior in history.

Cash flow balancing is needed in order to create wealth! It cannot be done without a balance between production gains and income gains. The devaluation of our dollar destroys wealth too when it is used as a badly designed tool for improving exports. Wealth is only enduring when it is based on a currency that is stable and neither too strong nor too weak. That can only happen in a stable healthy economy. Wealth in our society is not only an abstraction as in money; it exists in the two cars, in nearly every middle class, and many lower, households. It exists in our homes that more of us own than anywhere else on earth. It exists in our highly educated populace of willing workers. It exists in the capital goods that our factories use to produce goods. It exists in the jobs that are a just and fair means of distributing it among our population. It exists in the natural resources that are used by each generation to build a better nation for the next. Wealth is what is we will have left behind for the next generation when we are gone. I cannot bear the fact that our leadership is destroying so much of it out of ignorance or by pandering to the short-term greed of their campaign contributors. "Things are getting better"? Not while you are misleading our nation w. Not while you are in charge! God bless and keep you all safe and help you find a leader who will build a stronger healthier and wealthier nation with the great people that live in this one.