I am thrilled to pay taxes for cops, roads and schools.

Not so much for: sports stadiums, TSA, unproven energy technologies, light rails that nobody will use, the drug war, bankrupt car companies, people who can't afford to pay borrowed money back, single mothers who have unreasonable amounts of children, *any* farm subsidies......

Do the LSU Tigers not have taxpayer supported sports stadiums?

Well, I agree that most of the things you cite I don't support either.

Certainly people who can't pay their mortgages have the option of going into bankrupcy, but the way I see it is that if it happens with ENOUGH of them, then the whole economy crashes. This seems to be what has happened already, because that is why all the major banks have become effectively bankrupt.

As more and more people become unemployed, then more and more businesses fail, and it is a downward spiral. My understanding is that the intention of the Obama budget is to try to kick start the economy.

I think that in a huge budget there will always be things that some favor more than others, but you have to make sure that you look at the whole picture.

We know that your employer agreed to pay you this much, but we're going to go ahead and take half. We will spend your money better than you would have.

Please feel free to take all of your salary and pay no taxes.

However, we would like to point out that you will be required to use your own, or your employer's, helicopter to go to work as you will not be allowed to use taxpayer supported roads.

Normally you will be expected to provide for your own security, but if your children are kidnapped for ransom by poor people police and FBI services will be available, but must be paid in advance in gold.

We have already lost >50% due to market downturn but Obama wants to make it personal now and destroy those of us that rose from nothing to build a life and prosperity.

I think this is typical of people who are just looking at the value of their own retirement accounts and not examining what is going on globally.

As you say, how can this person be in a worse situation than the person who has nothing now? Does he believe that his home, or the equity he has in the home will be confiscated?

However, I do think it is very interesting that in the boom years so many people have invested so much money in the stock market, or in real estate, hoping to "beat the market", though logically the idea that millions of people, who ARE the market, can beat themselves seems nuts.

However, I am just as stupid. A few years ago I had bought a house for $90,000, nothing down, and sold it four years later for $230,000. I thought that I was a genius.

If I had really been a genius, I would have seen the bubble for what it was and invested the proceeds in FDIC guaranteed certificates of deposit, instead of which it went back into real estate and the profit more-or-less disappeared.

The truth is that lots of people have thought they were financial geniuses, especially the people who were privileged to invest with Madoff or Stanford, who were not available to the lower echelons, whereas really they were just flotsam rising on a rising tide, and are now jetsam sinking on an ebbing tide.

If the economy and the dollar are strong, then we all gain, and if they are weak, then we all lose. It is that simple. That is why a Detroit car worker can take a month's pay and get a vacation in a luxury resort in Mexico, but a Mexican car worker needs to spend all his pay on rent and food.

What family or individual do you know that if they are in debt incurs more debt to get them out of debt? It just makes no sense.

Well, you might borrow money to fix up an apartment, then rent it out and use the income to pay off debts, get tax breaks etc.

Also a family or individual, as long as it has income, always has the safety net of being able to declare bankrupcy, so if the worst comes to the worst and it doesn't work all, all the debts can be eradicated and the family or individual can start all over again. Or maybe the husband goes into bankrupcy, and the wife not!

Another difference is that a family is unable to issue and print its own currency.

One way of looking at the current economic crisis is to say that the government borrowing right now can be paid back in the future in terms of devalued dollars, so really it is just a form of devaluation.

This is made more complicated by the fact that several other major world economies are also train wrecks, so even if the dollar is devalued, it may not lose much relative to the competition.

Probably what we are seeing, or what we will see when we look back from the future, is a major realignment of power and wealth on the planet that will favor China and India and other developing Asian economies versus the old style manufacturing economies of those nations that had their industrial revolutions much earlier.

Or maybe we are just going to see the economy of the whole world go sharply backwards a few decades.

However, it is not all doom and gloom and doubtless those who have skills that are of real value to humanity will continue to be valued.