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?

I.O.U.S.A.

I.O.U.S.A. is a tremendously important film coming to theaters in a matter of days. This documentary will examine the national debt and what its rapid expansion means for the future of America. David Walker makes an appearance in this film supported by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Pete Peterson is a billionaire trying to save us from ourselves. It seems that he is part of a strange and interesting sort of club: Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (global health), T. Boone Pickens (wind power)...

Meet David Walker

Change is coming to America, ready or not. Terrible fiscal policies and a broken health care system are just two of the myriad problems threatening the nation's security - no less grave than the threat of terrorism. Meet David Walker. On March 12, 2008 he resigned as Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office. He has since been traveling around the nation warning America of the financial tsunami headed our way. Wake-up Generation X and all of you Millennials. We are the ones who will have to mind the gap left by the generation before us. We will shoulder the costs of their policies. Inform yourselves, speak out against stupid short-term policies that call up easy votes but threaten the future of the nation, and get ready for an America that looks fundamentally different than either we or our parents have seen.

And if that video clip doesn't get you going, the conservative Heritage Foundation website points out that, "Without reform of entitlements, balancing the budget would mean driving up taxes to European level within a generation [emphasis mine] at the risk of European economic stagnation." I think about David Walker and things like an unnecessary war that costs over $12 billion/month, crumbling American infrastructure, and on and on... I think about these things whenever politicians talk about sweeping, permanent tax cuts. How nice for them that they get to live it up now, leaving young America holding the bag. An aside: hope you all had a great Independence Day weekend.