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I am not trying to win an argument with you. I am merely running a public relations campaign. I am merely showing everyone that you are a naif, and I will let them decide for themselves whether to give your arguments any additional thought. BTW the financial services leeches are one of our weaknesses, not one of our national strengths. If you look at all the ways that Wall Street got itself into trouble through malinvestment of liquidity that was publicly provided, requiring continuing massive public bailouts, little if any is because they overinvested in productive enterprises (physical, human and intellectual capital to increase our ability to provide goods and services). Most of it is shopping malls, high rise condos in LA, provided no principal, no down payment mortgages on speculatives property deals, etc.

You, just like the financial "experts" who got us in this mess, would not recognize a genuinely productive activity if you were smacked across the face with it like a cold dead fish.

And just for the record, I am descending from sarcasm to personal insult. It is your intelligence I am insulting, in the hope that you will wake up, realize that God gave you eyes to see and a brain to think about what you see and and eyes again to see whether what your brain thinks corresponds with what is really going on.

> It is your intelligence I am insulting, in the hope that you will wake up, realize that ...

Not a great way to bring people over to your side either ;-) .

> If you look at all the ways that Wall Street got itself into trouble through malinvestment of liquidity that was publicly provided, requiring continuing massive public bailouts,

I realize that I am wasting my writing effort. However, its a holiday ...

Financial mis-investment did not cause the 2007/2008 problem. It was caused by mis-direction of investment due to government interventions. No private enterprise would willingly invest into losing causes. It is government subsidies funneled through the Fannie/Freddie monstrosities that created the ground work for the disaster. This was made worst by the bailout. Keep in mind that even in 2007/2008 there were many well managed and profitable financial companies. Under normal circumstances, we would have had a massive cleanup taking place on Wall Street. Bad firms would go under and their resources would be absorbed by those organizations that were well run. Unfortunately, the bailouts made sure that this cleanup would never occur. The really horrible mistake of the Bush bailout is it effectively transferred financial resources from well run companies to the the mis-managed once.