I don’t know about you but I can’t believe what our government is doing. I don’t think what is going on now should be looked at from a standpoint of democrat vs. republican of liberal vs. conservative but common sense vs. living in a fantasy world. I don’t doubt our politicians want to do the right thing but I have never in my life been able to spend myself out of debt so I don’t see why our government thinks it can. After all the government is not a separate entity from you and me. What applies to us also applies to our government because we are the government. When our government says it is spending a trillion dollars that is our trillion!

I have also never had my life be always perfect with no ups and downs and I don’t think the economy is any different. I have had great times and I have had very low times mostly based on choices I have made. Many of my choices were based on lack of understanding of money and how to manage it and others were risks I took that did not work out. I learned from both cases.

When I had good times I often got restless and took a chance to make things even better but when I was short of money I was very careful about how I spent what I had and I studied what decisions I had made that had caused the problem and attempted to not repeat my mistakes. This to me is common sense. The fantasy thinking I speak of is thinking that no matter what you do times will always be good and even if things get bad temporarily someone will step up to fix it for you.

We have been blessed to grow up in a country that offered the opportunity of wealth to everyone but that has morphed into everyone having the right of wealth whether they earn it or not. It has taken me 30+ years of working to afford the down payment and mortgage for my own home and it is insulting to me for my government to proclaim that anyone who bought a home and can’t pay for it should be able to stay in it with government support. Excuse me, but I am trying to pay for my own home and can’t afford to also pay for someone else’s.

I am sorry the banks lent money to people to could not pay it back but they are banks and should know better. If the world economy falls apart because our bankers made bad choices then we will build it back with smarter bankers. We are paying the same guys that screwed it up to fix it. Again this is so not good common sense. I believe the pain we are experiencing now as a nation has to do with past decisions by many people and rather than try to avoid the pain we need to take what steps we can to soften the blow but let the pain come so we can reset our economy and start to rebuild this great country.

We can all tighten our belts and help each other rather than having our government take everything we have worked for and spend it irresponsibly or worse yet give it to someone they think needs it more than us. I agree that our government doing nothing is not the answer but doing something so huge that it may disrupt the whole fabric of what our country was founded on is so wrong. I personally think we have already thrown enough money at the problem and that money has not even really had a chance to work. The banks are just starting to lend again and only to people with solid credit – wow what a concept.

When did we start measuring the health of our economy on how much people were putting on credit cards? I keep hearing how if people got a stimulus check they would go out and spend it so that would jump start the economy. Maybe but how about putting money aside so you don’t need a handout if you lose your job. Again, where is the common sense of encouraging people to spend money on unnecessary things when there is a good chance they could lose their job. Eventually people will need new stuff and as they wear things out they will have to get new things and the economy will come back.

So there you have it. My opinion and this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I really think! Madalyn