A lot has happened, obviously, since my last post. For many months we've been learning more about what happened to our economy in the Fall of 2008 (and in the years leading up to it). The first person who really got through to me with his explanation was Michael Lewis in the December 2008 edition of Portfolio Magazine. "The End" is clearly and cleverly written. Definitely worth a read.

It seems our President has had little choice this year but to pass a stimulus bill to stop the free fall of our economy. He has to clean up the deep and varied messes left by a number of previous administrations (health care, lack of coherent Wall Street regulation, war x2, etc). Meanwhile, the warnings of debt increases put forward in IOUSA have become almost quaint. Yet IOUSA was right on point by showing how important health care reform is for our security. I didn't realize the Bush-era prescription drug benefit was such bad policy at the time, and I can't believe fiscal conservatives didn't hound the previous administration more about keeping war costs off the books, not to mention the tax cuts in a time of war. Insane accounting on Wall Street, and insane accounting in the White House. No wonder Bush's treasury guy (for one), Paul O'Neill, quit.

My Boomer father-in-law, a lawyer, was visiting the other day and surprised me with an angry rant about how everyone wanted to take stuff from him. Take away his money, his health care entitlement, his social security. It was sad. "Ask not what your country can do for you...", right? I just kept my mouth shut. I am, after all, barely old enough to be an X'er and am fully expecting to have little-to-no social security and to pay higher taxes to address a number of shortfalls including servicing the mammoth debt being run up to fix problems largely caused by his generation. It's scary but my generation and those that follow will do what we have to do. Meanwhile some of my own relatives can see only as far as the end of their noses, still flying the flag of the old Reagan revolution with its knee-jerk anti-government biases. There are many out there like that, unfortunately, and they still claim to be patriots. For which country, I wonder. The country of Me?