When all is said and done, the same people who got us into this financial mess will also be the ones to get us out of it. Those people are US!

Two things have gotten us into this crisis--the collapse of the housing bubble and the profligate spending of our government.

Who among us really believed that the value of our houses were actually increasing 5-6-7% every year? How many of us knew or read about people who tried to ride that tide of false financial "success" with unjustifiable loans, multiple real estate "investments", flipping houses, etc? How many of us were tempted to do the same? How many of us re-financed our houses with "home equity loans" in order to leverage those crazy increases in value to more disposable income, increases in values that deep down we knew were false? Lots of us I would guess.

Then as a decade's worth of Congresses spent and spent and spent, what did we do? Complain? Replace them by electing more responsible people? No, in most cases we asked for more. We wanted bridges built to our own nowheres, we wanted new museums and light rail systems and highways and new governmental services of all kinds. As the economy weakened, we expected government to pay us for not working. We all wanted more than "our share". Everyone else was enjoying the largesse, why not us?

So the result is what we see now. The result is not a surprise. Any American with even an ounce of common sense knew deep down that what happened at the end of the 20th century and beginning of this century was wrong and almost certainly couldn't continue.

So now there are all kinds of arguments of how to solve the problem, how to balance the budget, how to begin to repay our crushing national debt. Deep down we all know the answer. It's not hard. It's simple arithmetic. We'll each have to suffer life-changing differences in what our government does for us. And almost certainly we'll have to pay more of our income in taxes. The arithmetic is simple and deep down we all know it.

So the same people who got us into this mess will have to get us out. Those people will be me and you and the folks next door. We'll have to pay the price. There's no other way.

So why don't we demand that those we elected to represent us start now?