The government of the United States has decided that I need an additional 1800 dollars after my tax return this year. I should be grateful, but instead I’m mostly scared. I’m not afraid of the money, in fact it will either pay off a lot of bills or send me and the Husband and two little ones on a much needed and long awaited vacation.

I’m scared, because I feel like giving everyone a little extra money instead of really investigating why the economy is in tatters is kind of like pumping six units of blood into a patient with internal bleeding and then sending them home without even bothering to open their chart. The question I’ve been asking myself for a while now is, “what is wrong with the economy?” It would take a truly ignorant person to deny that there is anything wrong at all. If I look at my immediate area I see the decay of local business, factories that have been here for decades closing down, workers getting paid a third of what their job was worth six years ago… Oh, yes, there is something going on. Something far greater than what a nice additional rebate can solve.

Just look at the way people live these days. The majority of Americans live far beyond their means, buying brand name clothes and sneakers and HD TVs on credit, subprime mortgages and fancy SUVs that they don’t really need and certainly can’t afford. Everywhere there’s a crisis- the housing crisis, the buying crisis, the selling crisis, there’s crisis for car manufacturers and mobile home builders. My old home town in Ohio saw Timken steel ship out, a Rubbermaid plant close and a few other manufacturers ship out of state in a few short months, suddenly there’s upwards of 5000 people wandering around jobless… Four years later, Ohio still has an unemployment rate nearly two percent above national averages.

My question is: will my 1800 solve this? I think not. I think that the heartbeat of America’s economy is lagging, and this is just a paddle to the chest to perk things up again. It may treat some symptoms but it certainly is far from a cure. I find it odd that Bush announces his “economic stimulus” plan just as the primaries are beginning and that it will follow through just as they end, but I’m not a tin foil hat kind of girl.

Maybe I should be.

It is a testament to the Bush administration that they have managed to turn me, a fairly reasonable person, into a raving lunatic when it comes to my hopes for this country’s future. All I can say is that I hope whoever the next President is, that they realize you can’t slap a bandaid on an arterial bleed and call it cured, and that you have to always find the problem behind the symptoms. You can’t stall the American people into complacency when it comes to occupying foreign countries (I refuse to call Iraq a war- major combat operations ENDED) and you can’t buy our good graces with barely enough money to pay off a month’s bills.

We need solutions. More than that, we need to have enough confidence in our government that we don’t live in fear.