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I will agree with you that the economy stinks. I think it is because of excessive govt. and excessive debt.

I would like to go back to the Great Depression years and ask, why did this happen. I think it was because of excessive debt. I don't think you can blame the great depression on illegal immigrants, trade deficit, cheap chinese goods, the japanese, the french, drug abuse, africa, aids, over taxation, arabs , free trade, globalization, or any other convienent scapegoat.

I would like to hear your theory on the great depression and why it happened. You may find a lot of parallels to our time now, namely excessive debt and stock speculation and manipulation.

Finally, I just don't understand how you can make statements like "Only in the last 30 years have we made backwards movement. " when you have the counter example of the Great Depression.

of course we had backwards movement in terms of prosperity for our people during the 1930-1945 period. But I view that as an aberration and would throw it out of the statistics for analysis. Since 1970 we've had slow backwards movement that is difficult to perceive when you're living in this time. But it is real. And this is unprecedented in our nation's history. My main argument is that all of this backwards movement can be traced to bad government policy and that we as a people are letting them walk all over us. I believe that this backward movement in the last 30 years is due to many very bad regulations of private industry, unwise tort laws, run-away government spending, high taxes in some cases, a dysfunctional education system and in the last 15 years very stupid trade policies.

I am not an economist, but I can regurgitate what I read about the 1930's depression from Milton Friedman's book. After ww1 the economy had some very rough spots. As you know we had recently imposed an income tax. Coolidge cut taxes dramatically and we had a very big boom after that during the 1920's. It was a great boom, all boats rose with the tide. But the stock speculators got greedy. They made rules on wall street that you could buy stocks with borrowed money and they lowered the standards in such a manner as to encourage speculation. So, a bubble developed in the stock market. When the correction came it harmed relatively few people at first. But it harmed some people and there was a bank in NYC that went bankrupt as a result of this. As they shut down lots of people lost their deposits because we didn't have FDIC back then. This caused another bank failure in NYC several weeks later. The Federal Reserve at that time didn't believe in bailing out banks in order to protect the nation's money supply. They knew full well that the money supply was being pummeled each time a bank went under and they did nothing to stop it. By 1932 one third of the banks in our nation had gone bankrupt and the money supply had contracted by one third. At that time the philosophy changed and they decided to intervene and stop further bank bankruptcies. But the damage was done. Our economy was in a shambles and it didn't come back until post 1945 really. Some people who believe Federal Reserve propaganda will actually tell you that Smoot-Hawley caused the depression. That was a minor factor. The main factor was one third drop in money supply and that was only triggered by the initial stock market correction and resulting bank failures in domino fashion.

I think now we need a similar intellectual adjustment that we had in 1932 when we finally decided to not allow further bank failures, when we finally decided that keeping the money supply stable was a key. Our trade relationships must be prosperous to us. This unlimited free trade, especially with a nation that does not let it's currency float is suicidal. A hundred years ago the Republicans stood for protectionism. Today it is a dirty word. I think trade is great, but it must benefit both nations engaging in the trade. I've outlined elsewhere the changes I seek in trade policy.

I think we have a great moral obligation to open up trade with the poor nations of the planet. Bush is currently planning on opening up the ability of very poor african countries to export to the US and he knows full well that they are unable to buy anything from us. I think that this is good because these very poor countries need a lifeline. Just 15-20 years ago China needed a similar lifeline and I'm glad we threw them one. But today China does not need that. We need to have better trade policies.

THe United States as an institution should look out for the interests of the american nation. Other concerns should be secondary. If we build a world where governments routinely ignore the interests of the nation they allegedly represent, then we are not building a nice world at all.