What we are dealing with in detail I am not professionally qualified to discuss (I'm not Sarah Palin, I know my limits.) But what we are dealing with in the grand scheme of things seems pretty simple. The US has been living beyond its means. The US has been spending and borrowing as if its economy were fiscally secure; and the demand for more and more from below combined with signals of total laxity from the top has led to a massive over-reach in terms of personal and public debt. In the end, gravity and reality count, whatever the Bush-Cheney propagandists want to insist.

Like the invasion of Iraq, for which the US is still paying; like the massive Bush tax cuts, which were never matched by cuts in spending but combined with massive increases in spending; the home-ownership-as-speculation bubble eventually hit the reality this country's leadership has for so long denied.

Greenspan says what is obvious: that we cannot afford McCain's continued tax cuts and minimal spending restraints. We cannot afford Obama's spending plans either - but at least he isn't proposing to increase the debt. Neither candidate has been behaving with the gravity this crisis demands. But McCain's trivial, deceptive, distracting tactics have been by far the worse.

I wonder if Rick Davis could tell us again whether he thinks this election should be about personalities, not issues.

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