by Gary Gagne

Created on: November 07, 2008   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

I believe that the economic situation in the United States and around the world is worse than it has been since about 1928. People have said they believe the economy is the worst we've seen since 1933 but at that time we did not have federally secured savings, unemployment security, Social Security or welfare and no one to help people in trouble with their mortgages. Failure in the stock market amounted to a drop of 80% by 1933 (and wouldn't come up again to1933 levels until the 1950s). So far this year the stock market has lost approximately 50% of its value; can 80% be far behind? Until 1933 we did not have an activist government trying to defuse economic problems as they arose. The Bush administration, is showing the same lack of leadership and confusion . Since the 1950s the Republicans have been hard at work dismantling the "New Deal" safety net, built by Franklin Roosevelt during the 1930s,creating instead immense deficits and deregulating the business environment, making our current situation worse than it ultimately has to be. We don't know everything there is to know about our current economic dynamics particularly as they relate to the new global economy, but we seem to be in the midst of a domino effect where one industry after another is failing and in need of a bailout. In short we are about ready to go over the edge of that cliff that our economic administrators have been talking about it doesn't seem anyone has any coherent plan on how to reconstruct FDR's safety net or how to create the 5 million "green jobs" that are within the realm of political imagination.

According to Jeffrey Sachs now is the time to make changes within our society which will allow our children and grandchildren to have a quality of life, comparable to our own. Pouring money into a failed economic system will not save that system, providing tax decreases will not save us. These tactics are merely first aid treatment to stop the bleeding. We will need time, a lot of time, to repair our infrastructure and to morph or build up our economic landscape to answer the new realities of the 21st century. Since we haven't been here before we don't know what that landscape will look like. First and foremost we will have to successfully address our energy problems. we must expend a great deal of money in research and development to make investments that will pay off in the future rather than right now. We have to make some hard choices and set our priorities as a nation because we

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