Let's hope Peter's wrong, but I have a feeling he's right.

 Anyway, I'm sure every single one of you here knows about the situation. If you don't, now's your chance to learn.

The stimulus program proposed by Bush and Congress won't help us. What it does is it forces the government to find money that doesn't exist and give it to the American people. The government is going bankrupt. What we have to do to get this money is either borrow more from China or print more dollars. If we borrow more money, we'll just be deeper in debt. If we print more money, the value of the dollar will go way down.

If we keep inflating the money (which we have to do to compensate for our current fiscal policy) and the value of our money goes down, we'll just suffer in both the global and the domestic markets. Yeah, that will do us a lot of good. The stimulus will only add to this problem. Because the dollar will be devalued, the money that families will get will be worth less than their money was worth BEFORE they got the money, because inflation is so high.

The Republicans want lower taxes. We can't afford lower taxes if spending levels are so high. The democrats want a bigger stimulus. I just explained why that's bad.

Why are oil prices so high? Actually, they're not. The rise in price of oil in terms of gold has been 20-30%. In terms of US dollars, however, it's approaching 400%. Oil is traded in US dollars so it looks more expensive than it actually is on the world market.

Lowering interest rates right now will just encourage people to borrow more and get deeper into debt. Do you really want to owe more money during an economic depression? Everyone loses out when this happens, even the major financial institutions.

While we will have a major economic depression compared to the one seventy years ago, the rest of the world will only have a minor setback. This will actually be GOOD for the other countries because we consume more resources than anybody else. If we crash, the resources we used will go to other countries like India and China and help them tremendously.

This should have happened decades ago but it didn't because we were the economic bullies of the world. Now that living beyond our means has finally caught up to us, we can let the free market work its course in the world while we suffer the consequences of our imperialistic jingoism.

Canada and Europe are all "IN YOUR FACE, AMERICA! WE TOLD YOU SO!" I don't blame them.