Sorry if I sound pessimistic but I have been reading stuff about the world's / US's economy for a while and that's just how I am.

If you were one of the candidates for US president, would you really want to win? Do you think either of them really has a chance to withstand the weight of the falling bear otherwise known as "the economy"?

Add to this the geopolitical problems, the oil problems (which by the way won't be solved with a simple "drill drill drill" policy), and I think we have the perfect recipe to guarantee that the next president will have a hard time being elected for a second term.

Nader

I do agree that no matter who is president, the U.S. is headed for a train wreck in the next fifty years both economically and in terms of its power throughout the world. We are the new Britain and Rome. China will be the new America at least in terms of power.

At least we have more land than Britain, which should let us slide out of power more gracefully. No messy colonial battles either.

We will enter into another major depression within the next twenty years as a result of energy costs and the depreciation + inflation of the U.S. dollar due to our outstanding debt.

It's a shame that people don't realise that governments have very little to do with these economic issues, and there's little they can do to improve things.

It's called a free market for a reason, people.

I would agree before having seen the series of taxpayer-funded bailouts we've been seeing recently.

Once the dominoes start falling, forget about the free market.

 Well, yeah, it's all essentially just damage control, though.

What gets me, though, is that in the UK every right-wing newspaper is blaming the government for the entire problem, when really it was the banks' fault (the UK banks kept buying over-valued houses from the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before they realised that, really, they were worth nothing).

I think it was the banks' fault as well as the government's fault for not regulating who can receive loans. What happened to fiscal responsibility?

From the government's perspective... if you're going to end up downplaying the free market (by bailing out banks), you might as well do it earlier (by regulating) and avoid all the trouble that we're seeing now.

 Well, the bailing out at this stage was kind of neccessary, as without it the economy would have had a massive drop. I believe it's best to "delay" the inevitable, as it allows for things to go down in a staggered manner.

I don't think the government stepped in earlier is because, from the fronts of things, everything looked really good. Even if the government had realised what had happened, they might not have stepped in thanks to the controversy that would have surrounded it. People, or shall I say, voters, would have seen banks reporting recored profits and such on one page of the newspaper, and on the next they would have seen the government putting down restrictions on it all, without any apparant reason.

At the end of the day, it's all just the nature of a free market. Things go up, then they go down, people learn from their mistakes, and, when it goes up again, it goes up even further as people don't repeat their missteps. However, the government must step in to try and curve the plummet, in order to keep people alive.

Sorry if that made little sense, but it made sense to me.

So in other words, being fiscally irresponsible is fine as long as:

a) the impact of your actions is bad enough to warrant being bailed out for the sake of the country; and

b) your actions don't make things look bad on the surface.

Thinking superficially about it may make your interpretation seem reasonable, but in reality you have just laid out a pretty good recipe for screwing up the economy and the country.

 Hey, I wouldn't do it myself. I'm just saying that it would be what these politicians would do, aslong as it would keep them up on the polls.