The heck with a mere 120 days of Obama's deficit spending. What about a trend that has been observed for at least thirty years: Concentration of wealth.

Would it be a good thing if this country consisted of a handful of trillionaires and hundreds of millions of paupers? If not, what "natural" free-market forces might come into play to prevent this from happening? If it's not a good thing and the free market won't stop it, should the government intervene?

I sort of felt the same until the California vote this past week. It gave me faith that even in a liberal state the majority of us still oppose large government and can still see through the BS of special interest.

Well, "liberal" is a slippery word, just like "conservative". Both words seem to mean anything the speaker wants them to mean.

We supposedly have government because it's alleged to be better than having the biggest meanest SOB pushing everyone else around. In practice, it just seems to deliver different kinds of big mean SOB's: Instead of using clubs or swords, they use money and lawyers. The results are barely different.

I dislike powerful government because power attracts dirtbags who turn government into just another big mean SOB. I think the trick is to have a government that is able to keep dirtbags from doing harm without becoming a dirtbag itself. Practical implementations have thus far been elusive.

What kind of powers do you think a government should have?

Yet, we need higher GDP, not heavier taxation and government control to ever work ourselves out of what has happened and is yet to happen.

OK, then tell me how you think we can do this. It seems that the investors have all the money, and that they prefer to invest in sending jobs overseas so they can make more money faster. What is your plan for persuading investors to invest in creating jobs here?

As I understand it, the government offer really IS liquidation. The government has said it will pay $2 billion to buy the parts of Chrysler's corpse that would be needed to create a new incarnation of Chrysler.

Yes, the unions would enjoy special treatment under this deal. They'd be stakeholders in the reincarnated Chrylser. However, this favor isn't coming out of the $2 billion that the government is offering. It's something extra that the government is doing for the unions. You are welcome to criticize the wisdom/motives/whatever behind this largesse, but saying that it's stealing from the bondholders isn't correct. It would be closer to the truth to say that the bondholders are angry because they're not getting their own government handout.

I think the bondholders could kill this deal simply by finding other party(s) that would be willing to put up more than $2 billion for what's left of Chrysler. This is simple Wall Street logic: Something is worth only as much as you can get someone else to pay you for it. If no such buyer can be found, then Chrysler's corpse is worth exactly the $2 billion that the government has put on the table.

I have heard compelling arguements to support a Constitutional Convention.

I've thought about that. The tricky part is avoiding the situation where the foxes get to design the new henhouse. I also don't trust our corporate mass media to accurately convey what a new constitution would say. We have too may people who believe what they hear on TV, and it would be easy to fool many such people into voting against their own best interests.

I am no fan of government regulation. I regard it as a last resort to be tried only when nothing else has worked.

To the best of my knowledge, the fundamental rule of capitalism is that the people with the money call the shots and get the lion's share of the goodies. This worked OK for the rest of us when making money pretty much required creating good jobs for people like us, but that doesn't seem to work anymore. Investors can make more money by sending work overseas, so that's what they've been doing. The stagnation/decline of U.S. wages should have caused problems years ago, but the pain was masked by a flood of faux wealth created by the subprime lending spree. Today, we are suffering withdrawal from the drug of crazy subprime lending AND we are suffering the pain of the wage loss that had been masked for all those years.

I'd love to hear a solution that did not involve government intervention, but I am no longer willing to believe that just leaving the market to itself will produce anything that we would call a solution. I believe that people who accumulated immense wealth by doing things that ultimately hurt the country will continue to do those things as long as it makes them money. I don't think those people give a rat's patootie about the country, or about anyone it in but themselves.

I believe that waiting for market forces to fix things will result in a severe decline in our standard of living. Perhaps jobs will start moving back to the U.S. when the average person doesn't have sanitary sewer service, running water, or electricity, but I'm not too fond of that "solution". Are you?

Please tell me if you think you know a way out of this pickle. However, I'm not interested in a vague hand-waving invocation of capitalist dogma. Tell me your idea(s) for creating GOOD jobs (not Wal-Mart barely-subsistence wage jobs) that don't depend on the elusive capitalist good fairy. Explain why the jobs your plan would create would be U.S. jobs, rather than jobs in other countries. Explain why investors who want the maximum return on their investments would go for your plan.