Five Economic Questions for the Candidates

Prince Otto von Bismarck is credited with the sneering remark that "there is a special providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Of course, that was in the age of presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, so Bismarck, the greatest statesman of his age, was entitled to look down on the quality of American leadership. One wonders what old "Blood and Iron" would say today if he were looking at the magnificent triumvirate of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. (At least Curly, Moe and Larry were funny when they stuck their fingers into each other's eyes.)

Every several weeks, I write a column suggesting what this presidential election might look like if we had serious candidates and a press corps that treated the presidency as an important office in which vital decisions would be made by its incumbent. I invariably get flooded with e-mails telling me, basically, "Blankley, don't hold your breath."

Nonetheless, I shall persist -- but continue to breathe. Some serious questions should be posed to the candidates at a moment when the world shudders on its economic axis, with inflation showing its ugly head; oil at more than $115 a barrel; grain prices at historic highs; grain shortages leading to riots in Third World cities; the worst (still unresolved) financial crisis since the Great Depression; a dollar crisis; the prospect of an American recession that might pull the world's economies into its vortex; and a dangerous political trend away from healthy international trading practices.

Here are five questions for the three candidates. In several of these questions, the important -- if informal -- relationship between the president and the Federal Reserve Board chairman will be critical.

Short of replacing the current congress of a majority of its membership, as well as both political parties, firing the Fed, these questions will not be asked or answered of candidates, well stated and understood by much of the public should they be presented. I doubt if they will be asked anywhere else.

Miracles happen though. Should questions such as these be brought to public consciousness, a waterfalls flood of questions will come forth as a bursting dam and the media will be forced to abandon its idiocies...with the media, maybe, why bother...get rid of them too...I am reminded of a line from a wonderful short poem from jr high school that I have reworded slightly...’getting and spending, they lay waste our powers’ ...time we recognized it and get our powers back. Candidate selection and the performance of our political parties has been pathetic. The middle class is dying. Understand that corporate globalism, transnational interests that have more money than groups of G7 members, have no need ultimately for a US middle class as consumers and have no interest in the middle class recovering AS CONSUMERS. US is apparently looked at as a trading region, a kind of ‘company store’ so familiar in past American history as Tenn. Ernie Ford used to sing about...”another day..and deeper in debt”...Innocently, uknconsciously he was singing about the future of our middle class, so rudely announced by Johnson in the sixties before Ernie was dead.

Great poem. I liked it so much that I memorized it in high school without being required to do so.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.