With all this Obama talk -- I found this cool site...

Gordon,

In this particular discussion, I feel like I have an advantage over you and probably everybody else on this board ... I spent 16 years as a government employee in Dade County (Miami), Florida.

I drove a bus. Then I was a transit instructor. I saw my little section of government do an incredible number of astonishingly stupid things, because money was never an issue.

Less than 15% of transit revenue came from fares. The rest came from local, state, and federal taxes. That money was taken away from the people who produced it and given to morons who produced a much bigger transit system at much bigger taxpayer expense ... and which produced even less income in the farebox.

I misspoke. I said money was never an issue. Actually, most top-level transit agency employees spent most of their work hours figuring out how to get more money. No, not thru the farebox, silly. More TAX dollars. Their mission was to squeeze more out of the residents of Casper, Wyoming and Worcester, Massachusetts, so they could expand the unused transit system in Miami, Florida.

Boondoggle. Let's move on.

George Bush was an idiot.

Barack Obama is just Little George.

When you take money from producers and give it to non-producers, you get non-production. I 100% guarantee you that Obama's "stimulus package" will stimulate a huge spurt of non-production.

But you asked for an idea, not a rant. At first I was hopeless, but I kept thinking about that over the weekend. And I have a long-term solution.

Beginning in 7th grade, and every 2 years after that, for as long as a child is in school, they would read and report on the book Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt.

A 5th-grader would understand Hazlitt's book. It was published the year before I was born (1946), so it's old as hello. But it's also timeless. You can read reviews at Amazon.

It is a life-changer. If every kid grew up understanding how economics really works, our world and our future would change.

That is my solution.

Richard Dennis