Just a few from this morning's Wall Street Journal...

• U.S. Stock Futures Tumble

• U.S. Dollar Falls Against The Yen

• Markets Brace For Downgrade's Toll

• Germany's DAX, down more than 20% today from its intraday high on May 2

• The STOXX 600 (European stock market) down 20% from its high in February

• Asian Markets Reel After U.S. Downgrade

• Stocks Tumble In The Gulf

In one post I made here recently, I opined that the stock market could lose 50% of it's value in the case of a default, maybe less with only a credit downgrade. When the stock market was at it's highs for 2011 recently, the total value of the stocks traded was $15.39 trillion. If the market actually does fall by 50%--it's already fallen over 12% in the last two weeks--that means over $7 trillion of wealth will have disappeared. That's about half of the GDP of the U.S. for an entire year. Even as I write this, over $2 trillion of the world's wealth has evaporated.

If anyone believes that the wealthiest Americans would prefer to lose half their wealth instead of paying a percent or two in income tax if it was a part of a plan that might have avoided the S&P downgrade, you're delusional. If anyone doesn't believe that it's been the actions of the U.S. government over the last 10-12 years that got us to this point, you're really operating in a totally different world. Does anyone still believe what some Tea Party leaders said only last week, that a default would be OK and a credit downgrade would be no big deal?

What's the effect? What will the effect be in your household? Will you think twice about spending, buying that new car or appliance or even new clothes? Multiply that by most of the households in the world. Then think of yourself as a business owner. Would this be the time to hire more employees, to build a new plant, or even buy some new equipment?

You can easily see what the effect of this disastrous situation will have on our economy, on our wealth and the confidence that consumers and business owners will have going forward. If you want to blame someone, blame ALL the people who served in national elected office since about 2000. Not one party, not one person has more responsibility than another. Collectively, their governance of this country may have started the ending of an era. It may have started the inexorable decline of the U.S. in world leadership.

The scary thing is that the role government can play in assuring a strong economy is to provide an environment wherein both consumers and business owners can confidently make decisions. Have you heard ANY ideas coming out of Washington that might accomplish that? Have you observed ANY conduct by our elected leaders that gives you confidence? I haven't.

More importantly, our government CANNOT keep spending as it has. First, there's the problem that there will be substantially less wealth in the world available to lend to us. Of course, there's the question of confidence in the reliability of our government as a large borrower. Then there will be the impact of whatever spending cuts may be agreed on. If it's thre Tea Party's "cut, cap and balance", millions of government workers would be out of work very quickly. If it's a less agressive plan such as recommended by the Simpson-Bowles Commission, the reduction of government jobs would be less but still significant.

Will the adoption of either plan have the effect of strengthening the U.S. economy, putting more people back to work? Make consumers more confident? Provide the stability to business owners to make them want to hire and invest? You know the answer and so do I.

The answer is pretty obvious, isn't it? This is going to hurt, hurt all of us. Heck, it already has hurt any of us that have 401(k)'s or investment accounts.

We can't sustain the way we've run government in the past. So there's a choice to be made, I think. The dramatic immediate plan of the Tea Party or something painful but which would spread the pain over a longer period, like Simpson-Bowles or even the Ryan budget.

We'd better be thinking about it while we're not out shopping or vacationing.