Thank goodness our economy is tanking. Maybe the candidates will start talking about something real instead of how cute Sarah Palin seems kneeling over a dead moose.
Palin makes good copy, we know that. But the events of the last 48 hours make for even better copy. How do you fathom $75 billion needed to save AIG, the largest insurance company in the world? Or the bankruptcy of Lehman? The sale of Merrill Lynch?
The candidates need answers and John McCain can’t hide behind Palin. She can’t help mask his long held views against regulation. Nor can McCain suddenly disguise his support for Bush’s Republican policies by simply calling himself a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican.”
On the morning news shows, McCain could offer only rhetoric. What’s his plan? How does he pull us through?
Obama, on the other hand, seems to have pegged this right. The free-market Bush policies gave tax breaks to the rich and fanned the flames of greed. With government looking the other way, financial institutions had the green light to do as they wished, which allowed for some trickle down wealth to the masses through inflated housing prices.
And then that market collapsed.
Obama proposes to go after the corporate wealthy and give tax breaks to the middle class. It’s an approach that seems more helpful than anything McCain has mentioned.
Just don’t expect any of the politicians to put much blame on those who might deserve it most–us.
The news will concentrate on culprits like CEOs and Wall Street guys.
They enabled. But we followed.
All of us who have indiscriminately re-financed and borrowed heavily the last seven years have to share some blame for getting caught up in the greed culture that’s dominated American society.
Adam Lashinsky of Fortune Magazine was just on Fox Business News talking about the need for a “cultural unwinding” away from a belief that we can “have it all now.”
Clearly, a public attitude and perception change is needed on the road to any kind of economic recovery.
Maybe downsizing our greed with a “less is more” attitude is in order.
It’s times like these when there can take comfort in the spirtual. Whatever your belief, whatever name you give to the superior him/her/it, when the material world fails, it’s time to go inward.
That’s where the real riches are.
401k down? Make a deposit in the Bank of the Soul.