I’ve wondered to what degree perception of the scale of the problem is exacerbating our reaction to it. A trillion doesn’t buy what it used to, and I’m suspicious of people who pronounce huge numbers in tones of impending doom without trying to put it into context. We need to update good old Everett Dirksen by three orders of magnitude since the ’60s: “A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talkin’ real money!”.

Notice, too, that the severity of the reaction seems to scale linearly with age. Our idea of the value of a dollar got set in stone a long time ago, and a lot of us haven’t kept up with inflation mentally. I find things like house prices to be a real strain on my brain when it comes to really getting what they mean.

Dealing in percentages tends to preserve perspective, I think. I recently did a back of the envelope calculation of a fundamental measure of financial health, the debt-to-equity ratio, and for the US I came up with around 30%. Interestingly enough, the traditional advice from financial planners given to individuals and business has been that 30% is a healthy d/e ration, albeit at the upper limit. Run government like a business or balance its budget like your checkbook, it’s worth asking whether the crisis is real, or least inflated.

Hype in Washington? Why, the very idea!

If I’m honest, I worry a lot. This current stock dive seems to be the cause of European financial problems. We can’t be sure if we’re headed for a double dip or not, some say yes and some say no. I do know it’s painful as hell.

I have a friend who lost his job a month ago and is now trying to start up his business again. It had been successful and then in good times, he had gone to work for someone else because he got tired of working 16 hours a day. Now he’ll be doing that again, if his business takes off.

Another friend retired from the legal profession due to stress-related exacerbation of an illness. She started a small business that boomed at first but then as the recession deepened, her business slumped at a time when she couldn’t afford it. She is looking for outside employment but it’s hard for a lawyer to find non-legal type jobs since her education makes her overqualified for damn near everything that doesn’t carry a lot of stress.

Me, I worry that even if I get my novels edited and ready for publication, there may not be much of a market right now since Borders’ demise. In which case, I’m in trouble financially very shortly.

That carries down this national debt to the personal level. And instead of focusing of how to fix the country, we’ve had politicians on both sides of the row playing brinkmanship with our lives. They should have been figuring out how to grow jobs, how to make our lives a bit easier by smoothing out the economy so that people can live.

I don’t know how long this downturn is going to last but I feel like people are pissed off enough to turn out a lot of Representatives from both parties next election.

I don’t feel that the President has handled things very well. OTOH, he’s had a helluva lot on his plate since Day 1 and damn little help from either party to help him handle the issues. Instead, he’s had to spend a lot of time sorting out political issues.

Maybe it’s time we made the Presidency a one-term office of maybe 6 years so we can stop playing political football. Make term limits on Representatives and Senators so they all go away and there is a fresh turnover frequently. Perhaps the government would become more representative of what is best for the country instead of what is best for the politician.

I may have to advertise for a roommate and I do not want to do that. I value my privacy, cannot stand noise and I sleep at odd hours.

I saw some poll data on early early morning TV this morning. It’s interesting that a majority of Americans think we should have had a tax increase and there are some of the wealthier Americans bitching because there was no tax increase and they feel it would have helped and they were more than willing to pay them. Instead, I fear a lot of this load is going to be carried by those least able to afford it.

My two cents.