kulpims -- you're clearly madder than I am, but I too am astoundingly underwhelmed by what I'm seeing from Obama and team in this whole process of trying to address our economic issues. That's why I was tossing the question to the field, in the hopes of hearing some radical, but insightful ideas. Do you have one?

gwiz665 -- I'm worried about our debt levels too, but I don't think that's our "economic issue" right now. The problem is that our GDP is now shrinking, the economy is shedding jobs, and investors are too afraid to invest. If we don't turn that around, the problem won't be paying off our debt, but finding a way to feed people.

volumptuous -- I love that laundry list of issues, and I think that's a great set of ideas for fixing our "fairness gap" in this country. However, I think balancing budgets by cutting spending and raising taxes would just exacerbate our current problems.

Here's my radical, and hopefully insightful solution:

Immediately begin a program, modeled after the moon landings, to convert us to non-fossil fuels by 2020. We will spend multiple trillions of government money, funding research, and building infrastructure to suit the goal. We will invite foreign investment and foreign talent to assist, but we will maintain the patents on all technology developed.

This would leave us a world leader in the next great new wave of energy production, and leave us with not only a renewed industrial sector, but also a renewed educational and research infrastructure.

Fuck this nibbling around the edges with a sub-trillion dollar plan that doesn't have a central unifying theme.

We should consider a WWII level government program to pull us out of this, only this time we'll leave the war part out.

Don't you start!

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Aww, Nicki's not happy, whadda madder schnookums?

Aww, Nicki's not happy, whadda madder schnookums?

Well, extraterrestrials are quite real. The, ah, "source" for this information claims that the universe really does look as diverse as the cantina in Star Wars.

My argument with the "source" was if the alien technology was so advanced, why dissect cows? Can't they download all that information? The answer was that aliens are devoid of and do not understand human emotions.

Supposedly the main alien groups are the "grays" (the generic Area 51 midgets) and the "reptoids". What they want is either too complex or ridiculous to imagine, and as there is no solid proof for any of it, the skeptics must rule.

After hearing all this, I was madder that the ET retards have anti-gravity tech and dimensional warp drives while we with our "love" can only make lame hoverboards with leaf blower engines.

It seems that the siftquisitions have an almost palpable intent to inflame the situation to back the attacked individual into a corner. Then it's kill or be killed and they come out swinging like never before, which makes everyone even madder so they all feel even more happy about banning someone or at least running them out of town torches and pitchforks in chase.

I'll admit that such celebrations of mob justice do on occasion make us in the minority a tad nervous about what we say or more accurately how we say it. People get way too sensitive these days.

On the other hand, it is pretty rare at least, and in a number of cases that I've seen, "the witch" was a witch. <torches>

"Don't make me madder!" seems rather impossible.

The grandmother should have swatted the brother for making things so much worse.

I wonder how their parents would feel if they see that video after it gets a billion hits on YouTube.

While I think it's unfortunate a lot of people don't seem to have the knowledge available to make informed choices I think it's even worse of these companies to take advantage of them. These people are unwisely relying on the lenders as experts, who tell them they can afford and distort the facts, withhold information, and outright lie to get them to sign over. Buyer beware markets are criminal in my opinion, especially with something like a house loan.

I don't like that the government is having to bail out these people, but what makes me even madder is the complete lack of regulation that allowed these conditions in the first place. Obama does at least in the video propose one form of regulation, complete disclosure to borrowers, but I'm not seeing anything to prevent the companies from making these bad loans, nor from investment firms from using their customer's money to invest in these. Its not as if the CEOs care, all they have to do is make sure they offload the loans before they get stuck with them. Now the game has stopped, a few people have made a whole lot of money at the expense of a lot of people, and there's nothing that can be done to reverse that unless they've actually broken a law.

Further more for years all I've been hearing from the Bush administration is, KEEP BUYING THE ECONOMY IS FINE, KEEP SUPPORTING IT KEEP BUYING. Keep buying with what, the money they don't have by using credit? An economy sustained on loans and credit can't persist forever, eventually it'll come home to roost.

Seeing this just makes me madder and more depressed.

There is no justice in America.

Just money vs. bigger money, and the bigger money always wins.

The whole system is essentially a lie, and has been for decades.