“America can have a strong, but limited, state that sets the rules and polices them well. But we have to agree on the government’s role. ”

perhaps in order to do this, we as private citizens have to embrace more ’socialism’ in the private sector so that we can absolve govt. of those responsibilities? to resolve to become more interdependent with govt. rather than sitting on one of the 2 extremes, dependency or independency?

we don’t have to become like the amish in order to appreciate and mimic some their principles of community.

SEMCO in brazil and zopa.com are excellent models to provide a starting point of how to rethink this.

someone said very recently, “change does not come from the top-down, it comes from the bottom-up”. one does have to necessarily support the person who said this or his policies in order to appreciate the wisdom of this statement.

And let’s not even get started on Iraq…

The most aggravating meme, however, is this “spreading the wealth” fear mongering… hi principled in tone, warning of ubiquitous socialism (which most of those guys don’t understand anyway), and all the rest of this claptrap. Please explain this: I’ve been watching closely for a long while now. When I finally stopped counting, I had 230+ referances to K-Street &/or Bush white house…

* hiring industry rep/lobbyist/lawyer for some official position
* said rep writing legislation, ver batem, codifying desires of said industry
* receive full WH and/or congressional clout ushering bill into law
* quietly resign after just as quietly being “hired” upon completion of legislation, returning to industry for reaping of rewards they’ve just legislated.

Through all this, virtually no debate from GOP on merits, good sense, or even constitutionality of any of these things… just return on investment from donors. Bribery. They’ve been running a bourse for years now. There has been -0- regard from these guys for any principle, other than pass-through legislation to highest bidder, which they call: free market.

Does anyone know the definition of principle? Does the morphing of such vapid government operation described w/that term bother anybody?

And how does Wall Street… utterly corrupt rating agencies, +/- $50t of 90% worthless paper saturating the globe while 10’s of 1000s of these guys sliced off $m’s in “fees” and “earnings” off joe-the-plumbers bank accounts… how the hell do these bastards get a fear mongering voice anywhere accusing a 3-4% swing in income tax rates as “distributing wealth” while same crowd has been scooping helo-buckets into everyone else’s $$, scooping what they can like Appalachian mtn top coal mining operation, selling junk so unbelievable saturation point which has put entire US economy & USD at risk… and these guys are worried about income redistribution?

Are you kidding? AFAIC Max Headroom had more insight that George Will.

Sheesh… with “esteemed” pundits like this, no wonder we’re broke.

I grew up in this business as a risk manager, and a bit of a innovator there. I had experience with nonlinear dynamic modeling which most actuaries and financial analysts, even most quants, don’t get or use. The economy, and most industries are nonlinear dynamic systems, which means there will be cyclical behavior, and that behavior will be more volatile the greater the level of fixed commitments in the system that must be satisfied.

Economies that primarily use equity finance are more stable than those that primarily use debt finance. It becomes easier to have a cascade of failure the greater the overall debt burden is on the system. So, the total debt level has a major impact on the behavior of the economy. In 1929, total debt to GDP was 280%. By 1941, that level was 160% or so, where it stayed (more or less) until 1985.

After that, debt to GDP moved up parabolically to 360% by 2007, and now we find ourselves in the soup in two ways: 1) total level of debt, 2) complexity of debt because of securitization and to a lesser extent, derivatives.

Why did the depression end around 1941? Reason 3 (my reason): enough debt had been paid down or written off, and loans could be made to good borrowers, but only enough that financial sector would grow slowly (not faster than GDP).

The answer today, in my opinion, is that we need expedited procedures for bankruptcy to reset the system, getting lenders to compromise with borrowers, and bring down the debt to GDP ratio. I don’t think the present programs will work, and they may actually prolong the crisis, a la Japan. In my opinion, we won’t see significant economic growth until the debt to GDP ratio falls into the 150-200% range.

Sorry, my “registered Republican” comments today lack bite, because I have successfully avoided CNBC in recent days. On a serious note, though, I really do not know what my Grand Old Party offers this nation anymore. Sorry, I have to reject its old standby policies that create huge economic divides, rape the environment, or generally sacrifice prosperity (scratch that, survival) in the future for expediency in the present. And if you think Bobby Jindal is a rock star, there are a thousand Indian guys still at McKinsey who are smarter and not counseled out of partner track.

All that power, and no politicians to abuse it to buy votes? Not very likely.

It will take at least two presidential terms for the Republicans to find their way out of W’s wilderness.