There will be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about yesterday's election. I truly did not see the Democrats taking the Senate. It's not been called yet but I've done the math in Montana and Virginia. Absent some whacky recount madness or votes suddenly appearing it's statistically impossible for the Republican candidates to overcome the current deficits. As it stands right now, Sen. George Allen would need every single oustanding ballot as well as a cemetery filled with about 4,000 mystery absentee voters to pull ahead.

The problem with politics is that you owe a narrow group of people for financing the start of your campaign. Anymore, it's actually probably a narrow group of corporations who give a candidate his first gush of money to get his campaign going. It might be a tobacco company or an oil company through its PACs. To get this money, many people don't mind selling their souls along the way with the idea that if they get into office then they can do those things that motivated them to run (such as being pro life or anti war or whatever) as long as the cost is doing the bidding of a tobacco company or another big financial supporter when called upon. It's not a good trade. It's gotten so brazen that here in Oklahoma one politiican supposedly openly said "you gotta pay to play." One politician here supposedly told members of a committee he chaired that the needed to contribute to his PAC to get their legislation pushed through committee.

When a person becomes president, he is the president for all the citizens of the United States. When a person is elected to the senate or the house, he must be there for all his constituents, not just the ones who gave big money. My advice to all returning incumbents and all newcomers... Govern for all the people. I would say that we'd be going back 40 and 50 years to get examples of leaders in Washington who conducted themselves in that manner.

America's long term economic security has already been sqandered. Nobody wants to take credit for that,
so we argue about stem cell research instead.

People disagree with me about the economic implications of government acquiring deficits. One hopes that with the Congress being from a different party from the President that spending will get reigned in again.

I believe deficits to be harmful. It hurts the government in its role fueling economic growth by government spending for things such as airplanes, cars, construction, etc. It hurts private enterprise because it takes money that would be available to fuel small business and puts it in loans to the government. A loan to small business might lead to growth in the economy. A loan to the government only leads to bigger government and to more debt service for the taxpayers.

I would venture to guess that the definitions of government surplus or government deficites are arbitrary, at best. Accounting tricks...counting item A as a surplus while counting item A as a deficit in another column. Corporations do this quite frequently - the assignment of specific entries can be manipulated to suit a specific need or agenda. On paper, our studio has shown a tremendous increase in revenues and worth for the past year; in reality, I still need to scrounge for cigarette money once in a while....Point: just depends on which way you want to look at numbers...in almost any case, financial numbers (like statistics) can be crunched to reflect a desired outcome.

One thing I think many voters forgot during the election (IF the financial status of the national economy was a motivating factor in their decision) was during the last few years, we've had 5 major hurricanes, 9/11, major forest fires, devastating earthquakes and tsunamis globally, into all of whic we poured billions if not trillions of dollars into....plus the ongoing ME war, more and more people on social security due to people just living longer, etc....

Just food for thought....its not really as bad as some would lead us to believe, its not really as good as others would lead us to believe. IMO, the truth falls somewere in the middle of the two.

Well, a major part of the problem is the publics' complete lack of awareness. Very few people realize that
roughly a third of the Federal Governments' revenue is being spent to pay interest on the deficit. That's
$406 billion dollars that got flushed down the toilet last year. Even less people realize that the government
has routinely been stealing all of the money that they're supposed to be saving for us in Social Security.
When ever you hear a politician use the words "Social Security surplus" you need to be aware that they are
stealing the money that they're supposed saving for our retirements.

Here's a good source of information on the subject:
http://www.federalbudget.com/