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Two recent articles that made me feel so...


Our leaders have squandered our wealth

NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush's assurances that we'll all be "just fine" if he and Congress can work out an economic stimulus package seem a little hollow this morning.

Much like Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's assurances last May that the subprime mortgage meltdown would be contained and not affect the broader economy. And it seems Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent most of the past year trying to influence Chinese economic policy rather than setting the direction of U.S. economic policy.

There is no question that Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will quickly come up with an economic stimulus package simply because they can no longer ignore our economic and financial crisis. That economic stimulus plan will amount to about 1 percent of our nation's gross domestic product, an estimated $150 billion.

But all of us should recognize that the stimulus package will be inadequate to drive sustainable growth in our $13 trillion economy. An emergency Fed rate cut and an economic stimulus plan are short-term responses to our complex economic problems, nothing more than bandages for a hemorrhaging economy.

Bush, Pelosi, Reid and the presidential candidates of both parties have an opportunity now, and I believe an obligation, to adjust the public policy mistakes of the past quarter-century that have led to this crisis. And only through courageous policy decisions will we be able to steer this nation's economy away from the brink of outright disaster.

We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.

At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.

All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us.

Bernanke endorsed the concept of a short-term economic stimulus package, but he cautioned that the money must be spent correctly: "You'd hope that [consumers] would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn't go elsewhere."

Just what would you have us spend it on? The truth is that consumers spend most of their money on foreign imports, and any stimulus package probably would be stimulating foreign economies rather than our own. Imports, for example, account for 92 percent of our non-athletic footwear, 92 percent of audio video equipment, 89 percent of our luggage and 73 percent of power tools. In fact, between 1997 and 2006, only five of the 114 industries examined in a U.S. Business and Industry Council report gained market share against import competition.

And let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink.




Campaign a lot of partisan nonsense

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Remember how excited everybody was just a short while ago that this presidential campaign was the first in 80 years to be wide open, without a president or vice president in the campaign?

Remember how excited we all were that American presidential politics had matured to the point that a woman and a black man were winning primary and caucus votes that allowed both to claim front-runner status?

Now Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ensnared in petty racial and gender politics and that does neither of them credit.

But at least the ugly spectacle that Clinton and Obama created should serve as a reminder to all of us that group and identity politics have outlived their effectiveness and that pandering to socio-ethnocentric interest groups and special interests, whether as large as corporate America or as small as the construction company in a congressman's district, has no rightful place in 21st century American politics.

The Democratic and Republican candidates for president have done hardly better than President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress on the issue of the war in Iraq. The candidates trip over one another to bring more of our troops home faster than the other candidates, or refusing to withdraw our troops from Iraq until the job is done; policy choices not dissimilar to the simplistic White House's false choices in either staying the course or cutting and running.

But these presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat, obviously would prefer not to discuss the war in Iraq in their campaigns, nor to state clearly whether they would secure our borders and ports as an absolute first condition before taking up the issue of immigration reform.

Both parties and nearly all of their candidates continue to drive false choices for the illegal immigration debate as well. The centrist and appropriate policy response to this crisis is to secure our borders and ports, and enforce current immigration laws.

Now that the economy has become the number-one issue for primary voters of both parties, we can expect the candidates to come up with new economic programs that will solve every problem in our society. Economic stimulus packages will soon be the order of the day, with more false choices: The Democrats will offer handouts to every man, woman and child and the Republicans will give drastic tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy as the panacea for what ails us.

These candidates will not have addressed the causes of our economic malaise: The critical issue of the faith-based free trade policies of the past decade that have been devastating to working men and women and their families, policies that have enlarged our trade debt to more than $6 trillion.

And while presidential candidates of both political parties talk about our public education system in terms of globalism and American competitiveness, they fail to recognize the crisis in our public schools and they fail to prescribe urgently needed solutions.

This partisan nonsense and predictable platitudes of this presidential campaign does not augur well for the nation, and I fear none of the candidates of either party is capable of extricating us from the mess their partisan politics have created.