The economy is structurally sound,
President Bush pronounced this week, but in one of those up-and-down kind of market fluctuations, it lost 63,000 jobs in the month of February.
That's almost 2200 jobs per day and one and a half jobs per minute. There's not one major company that could maintain that kind of uncontrolled job loss before being reduced to nothing, and our economy won't be able to for long either.
As for the presidential candidates, other than unprecedented fund raising abilities (on the democratic side at least), they don't seem to have any kind of plan beyond spouting anti-NAFTA rhetoric and they make no pretense of admitting that they in no way mean any of it.
At least President Bush, when campaigning in 2000, pretended whole-heartedly that his economic policy would benefit those he claimed; he may have even genuinely thought it would.
Obama and
Clinton, however, make their winking and nudging offensively public. As for
McCain, he has no plan whatsoever.