Show Me the Money!
Most of the news today is about the economy. Yes, ads are showing on the TV about every two to three minutes for one candidate or another in South Carolina and Nevada, in preparation for primaries tomorrow. But the big news today is the economy.
Last week in Michigan we saw Mitt Romney win big with promises of re-stimulating the economy. Voters soundly rejected John McCain’s blunt message that the jobs are gone, so retrain for the future. Mike Huckabee’s evangelical appeal and proposed Fair Tax barely made a blip on the voting screen.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is talking about fiscal responsibility while she has already proposed $800 billion in new spending. Barack Obama’s vision of universal healthcare is going to hit every working person in the pocketbook in a big way, while John Edwards continues to present his message of fighting for the vanishing middle class.
Whose message is going to appeal to the voters on Election Day? Well, if you are worried about losing your home, putting food on the table, or paying big bucks for fuel so you can get to work, then you will definitely want to look at who can help you make ends meet, and possibly even get out of debt. If you are one of the millions of people who have a stock portfolio, then you must shrewdly analyze who can turn the plunging stock market around.
In our shaky economy, banks won’t lend money, oil has reached $100 a barrel, and unemployment is up. The Dow Jones industrial average turned down 9.2 percent since January 1, 2008 and manufacturing is slowing more than expected. Then, of course, there is that major slump in the housing market, with huge amounts of foreclosures. Things are not looking rosy.
After the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke delivered his testimony to the House Budget Committee, we started seeing some action by the present administration to stimulate the economy. It appears that President Bush and the Democratic Congress are actually going to work together to complete a package designed to pull the country out of a potential (actual?) recession.
Depending on what happens with the proposed “Stimulus Package”, the tone of each candidate’s campaign may very well become less emphasis on who has the moral high ground and the ‘biggest vision’ to who has the best plan for improving the economy. After all, Americans are pretty practical and, once again, we may see a massive turnout of voters “voting their wallets”, rather than their conscience.
Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Congress, Dow Jones, Federal Reserve, Hillary Clinton, House Budget Committee, John Edwards, John McCain, Michigan Primary, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Nevada Primary, Politics, President Bush, South Carolina Primary, stimulus packageLeave a Reply
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