Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, McCaulay Culkin... serious train wrecks, all of them. It's sad to take a child, turn them into a Hollywood product, and spit them out the other end as a seriously screwed-up immature adult.

Some child stars, usually those with profoundly grounded families, manage to swim these shark-infested waters successfully. Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) has done an excellent job of keeping his head on straight, and his personal life out of the public view. It can be done. It doesn't happen in all cases.

I too would like to see Britney retire into rural Louisiana and take her poor damaged self out of the public eye. I have no interest in watching a damaged human being parade around in public. It's sad.

... who can take his/her 401K to the next job, who can flex with the times, retool his/her resume, and get the job of the future. Where a layoff isn't the end of the world but a new opportunity to find other work.

All very well and good except for that insanity between jobs when the family goes uninsured. When everyone panics. Puts health care on the credit cards, and prays no one gets sick until mom or dad gets a job.

Universal health care, along with the benefits the posters on this thread mention, would make the economy far more nimble. Workers would be willing to take a chance on a startup. Start one up themselves. Bop from there to here or back again, knowing it won't be financial suicide.

I have the luxury of being an independent business owner (with exactly one employee, me) because my spouse has a great union job with fantastic health care. How many more people would be able and willing to do what I do if they had the safety net of affordable health insurance? A lot.

I agree we need a paradigm shift. A move toward green energy would be most excellent.

However, the biggest and most significant thing the government could do to stimulate the economy is nationalized affordable healthcare.

Many, many people in America have great ideas. However, the fear of financial ruin through lack of health insurance stops a vast majority from starting small businesses or running with their ideas. Instead, all those potential entrepreneurs, inventors, those people with great ideas, they're stuck working for The Man, wasting their creativity in endless meetings and multi-layered corporate protocol. When the job with The Man runs out, they run for the first safe haven they can find, another job for another Man, who can provide health insurance and a 401K. If they have to take temporary contract work while they're unemployed, they will, but the real goal is another corporate drone job with health insurance.

All those engineers who might be thinking up the green energy solutions of the future need health care. So do their spouses and kids. So do their neighbors. So do the people who do the engineer's taxes. We all need it.

Providing health care for all will be a significant step toward fixing the economy. We can't afford not to do it.

The biggest canard I've heard about why nationalized healthcare would be so wrong is rationing.

We have rationing right now, just in completely stupid ways. Rather than rationing in a reasonable and prudent manner, we ration health care by income. Those with insurance can have it. Those with lots of money can get anything they want. Those with substandard jobs don't get any.

As the recession deepens, these kinds of stories will only become more prevalent.

"You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

--Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince

I think that's a problem with our tax structure that doesn't recognize the huge carbon-sucking value of trees. An enormous amount of carbon goes into the forests of the world, yet we fail to calculate that value when we're chopping down trees willy nilly to build houses, to build pallets, to make cereal boxes, and whatever else we do with trees. They have a value and a use in the ground and growing, even if we take the soil, water, and wildlife habitat out of the equation.

Until we recognize that use in our financial calculations, recycling will continue to fluctuate with commodity prices.

What if logging companies had to pay a hefty carbon tax for every tree they cut? And not just in the US but around the world? I think they should, in the same way that we're discussing carbon taxes for coal burning plants and the like. That tax would go across the whole system, raising the price for lumber, pulp, and other wood products. All of a sudden, you'd see recycling pay for itself. You'd see people scavenging wood from old houses, hoarding it, valuing it, and being extremely careful with it. Same with paper. It's too cheap now for us to treat it like the valuable thing it is. You'd see people thinking twice or three times before printing anything.

Dead tree newspapers might die a quick death. Books would be valued and not a throwaway. Lots of things would change as people's behavior changed toward wood and paper products of all kinds.

Go Obama! I want to go lead a parade, just on that tidbit of information.

A scientist!

An alternative energy physicist, Nobel laureate, who understands how to work in a bureaucracy. Wow. Just wow.