The American Spectator

If it’s appropriate for Financial Institutions to value their assets at market value and recognize any associated losses, it is also appropriate for me to record a loss based on my home’s reduction in value? Maybe I can reduce my income tax this year by showing a loss on the value of my home against my annual income. If it works for the bank, why shouldn’t it work for me?

p>Please convey my gratitude to Mr. Paulson for this great tax tip. br> — John Carper /p>

Miss Piggy wisely mused, “Never eat anything you can’t lift.” Maybe the American public, and certainly its leaders need to follow similarly sagacious advice: never invest in anything you can’t explain.

While riding the elevator to the top floor of the inner city school in which I teach, I will often overhear my more liberal brethren (and sisters) discussing political issues, and since the elevator is public space, I jump in with both feet without trepidation, though I am fully aware my Libertarian voice will be a lone one, and offer my thoughts. This week and last when I have heard Bush and Co. being pilloried, I have held my tongue; not because the administration doesn’t deserves a good lambasting, which it certainly does, but I hold my tongue because I don’t understand what the hell is going on inside the Beltway and on Wall Street. I read TAS daily and I comprehend the words, but the concepts, byzantine rules, fake outs and shake outs and the general defiance of laws, both economic and natural, leave me bewildered. When my Left leaning colleagues bash Bush/McCain, I can offer more finger pointing, both justifiable and un, but I cannot clearly explain why The Boy President and his minions are more culpable than the Bush administration. I can point out the Democrats malicious intents to benefit from the schadenfreude of the general public. I can easily throw their young messiah under the economic bus, but I can’t explain how the current administration’s actions do not violate our Constitution and the very fundamental basis of conservative economics. (Could Hayek?) The economy has been shot and Secretary Paulson is holding the gun. My arguments, to my own ears, would be mere equivocations.

The information published by mainstream media, Fox News, and blogs, both conservative and liberal, equally supports willful complicity as well as charges of complete incompetence. The explanations I have heard are more confusing listening to a blind man wearing wool mittens describing a Braille copy of an M.C. Escher sketch.

p>Bottom line, can any at The American Spectator explain in simple terms how we get out of this mess? I have no confidence in the POTUS’s speech tonight. br> — Ira M. Kessel br> Rochester, New York /p>