I know I am. I sure don't want any more government dictating what I do every day. Or providing for me when I don't need it. I do believe that we've gotten our government expenditures and those to whom services are provided a little out of whack. There are many examples, but to have the government provide subsidized healthcare to those who can afford to pay for it, while 50 million Americans don't have health insurance calls out for correction.

But the major differences that we've been talking about here and in other threads are the government's reaction to the slumping economy. Some believe that it's just another recession and will work itself out with little more than a few tax cuts. That's worked before, it should work again.

I believe our situation is far more critical than that. I don't believe that tax cuts, regardless of how big and to whom, will result in increased demand, more production and more jobs -- the economic recovery we all seek. In fact, if were up to me alone I wouldn't enact any tax cuts right now. It's not that I never would -- it's just that economic circumstances are so dire that I don't think the few extra bucks people would get would cause them to spend in the way needed to begin to re-energize the economy. For that matter, I probably wouldn't spend very much money on "shovel ready" infrastructure projects right now either. Again, maybe sometime in the future, but not right now -- it would simply take too long to have much of an effect on the spending-demand-production-jobs cycle. (I might say that for political reasons, neither of the things I would avoid will be avoided -- Congress will do both for political reasons, whether I like it or not.)

What I WOULD do is pump every available dollar into fixing the U.S. banking system. It is broken and cannot or will not fix itself without massive government intervention. The leverage provided by loans is the grease that makes our economy grow, so with no source of credit because of the broken banks, our economy might take decades to recover. The only way banks can "fix themselves" is to increase their capital. The only way they can do that is by selling equity, such as in common stock, or retaining earnings into capital accounts. Right now, there is no demand whatsoever for the stocks of banks and there are no earnings from which to retain for capital-strengthening purposes. The problem with this alternative is that it's going to cost more money than we can possibly imagine right now -- a lot more than the "stimulus bill" that President Obama is pressuring Congress to pass.

There are probably lots of ways to fix the banks' capital adequacy problems -- have the government buy all the bad loans, inject equity into the banks (as has been done so far), or even form a new "government national bank" to make loans and compete with the privately-owned banks. I don't know the answer, but I know that getting all the bad loans off the bank's books is what will be needed to get the economy going again. And I also know that such a fix will create so much national debt that many generations of Americans will have to work very hard to repay it.

Do I like this idea? Heck No! But this conservative-minded ex-banker sees no other way that will work to get our economy growing again anytime soon. When I say "anytime soon", I mean that even with massive government intervention the economy is not likely to recover before sometime in 2010. Without gobs of government money -- your money and mine -- recovery to economic activity as we have known it in recent years might take a decade or more. That means a real change in lifestyle for all of us. And anyone who knows the definitions would describe such government intervention as "nationalizing" or "socializing" important parts of our economy. That's what it is, like it or not.

I might add that whatever contrary opinions that are held by posters here, the economists, bankers, and financial experts of both conservative and liberal leanings seem to agree that the old ways of reacting to a recession cannot work this time. The financial crisis is simply too overwhelming.

So, we really don't have differences of opinion as "conservatives" or "liberals" or even "socialists". We all should have learned by now that "Republican" doesn't mean "conservative" any more than "Democrat" means "liberal" or "socialist". Our only difference of opinion is how bad the economic problem is that we're facing and what alternatives are available to fix it. Once we begin citing one fix or another, it's only then that people start assigning idealogical tags to the alternatives -- and those that propose them.