Help Wanted:Must be a Grownup

One convention down and one to go. Now we get to look forward to two months of the same kind of political ad that we have all grown to HATE!!!!

You may think I am going to lay into both candidates, as I like to do. No this one is for the voters of which I of course am one. Obama and to a lesser extent McCain will try to convince us that he will be the answers to all of our questions, the solution to our puzzles and the savior that will deliver us to that period in history where we consider to be the perfect age. When is that exactly?

For aging union workers like my father it is somewhere around 1952. Unions were strong, no jobs were lost to offshore outsourcing, and there was always enough money in the budget for steak.

For middle age conservatives it was somewhere around 1984. The economy was strong. Reagan was President and we were on the way to ending to cold war with the end of the Soviet Union.

For younger 30 somethings it is around 1996. Dot coms were producing lots of stock gains, we were spending the 'peace dividend' like it was monopoly money and the economy will be strong forever. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it and single handedly ended that nasty business cycle.

Now in the present. Everything is bad right? For the Truman 1952 crowd off shoring is ruining everything, for some of the Reagan crowd Compassionate Conservatism has given way to out of control spending and for the Clinton crowd, well everything Bill Clinton 'accomplished' was ruined by Bush. That about sum it up?

I look at it a little differently. Today the economy is on the downward part of the business cycle. We may be on the way back up or we may be sinking further. We won't know for a couple of quarters. We liked to believe that the Soviets became peace loving Russians but that was never true. Ever wonder why none of these former Communists never came out against Communism? Ever wonder why none of them ever said their conquest of the satellites was evil? It is simply because they don't believe it. Today awash with oil money Russia wants nothing less than to reconstitute the old Soviet empire under a new name and manager. Today government is doing what it has done since the days of the Progressives. They are picking winners and losers by choosing groups. The Democrats have their favorite groups and the Republicans have their favorite groups. For the cost of votes and contributions the party in power pays off their groups. I don't say this to say the are corrupt or evil, I truly believe they think that is the best way to help the most people.

Here is how I see economics. We make up the economy. That does not mean that the government has no effect. Far from it, the President and the Congress can either remove barriers or put up barriers. From there you and I take it away. Presidents do not however make your lives better through their existence. They cannot make the global economy become just an American economy again, nor can they make the dot-com world come back and they can't magically return us to a day when America was the only dominant economy in the world as it was in the early fifties. A little thing call a world way had eliminated most of the rest but only for a short time.

Presidents and state and local leaders can do one important thing that they don't do enough of now: Talk about what America means. The more freedom we can produce the better our fortunes will be. The better the climate for businesses to come here the more jobs for our people. The more our cities are cities and not war zones more businesses will come to your city. The cities are run by leaders and not city bosses (Chicago comes to mind) then the more people will have confidence in their leadership.

These all sound like platitudes that will never happen. In some ways they are. What they must start with is voting. Not voting for a candidate for a letter before his name, not for voting for a candidate because either are or aren't a women or of your race. None of these things will restore confidence to the political environment. Here is the tough one. Each and every American trying to produce, without caring about what other Americans have or make, but doing the best every day to be the best human being you can be, and if you make as much as some evil rich person. To me America is about individuals not groups. Politicians see groups. we have to make them see individuals or they will continue to sell us their make believe visions of what they will deliver. You are America, not McCain and Obama. Please vote in November but don't vote for a fairy tale. Vote with your eyes wide open.