The harder it will be to climb out of the hole

It seems to me that with the incredible debt load our country has racked up in recent years, that we need to get everybody to work. We have a lot of people-power that is not being utilized adequately if at all, such as the retired and unemployed folks. To get them into the GNP loop, gainful employment and even volunteer work to some extent to hone skills, needs to be designed to fit the ones to be doing the tasks; this will mostly involve tasks which are not of the 9-to-5 plus 3 hour commute jobs, but probably would be mostly internet coordinated, local shipping between home workspaces, that kind of thing. Since there is such a huge amount that needs doing in this country, and so very many people who are underutilized, the two need matching up. The relatively few wealthy retired probably won't be part of this unless unusually altruistic; but the vast majority of the rest of the folks could pitch in, get started paying off the huge national debt, while re-establishing national capability to produce even the small things even at a small scale. Nurture the true craftsmen, the artisans, the imaginative thinkers, by providing things on which to practice and show gainful result, even on a partial volunteer basis. Making at least part of the reward to be participation in things that are fun to some extent and bring increased joy to life and satisfaction in a job well done.

There are probably big lessons that ought to be being learned re the factors that created the big debt, but hopefully we Americans will eventually figure that out and deal with it appropriately. But time is a-wasting, as it is said, let's get everybody busy helping out and coordinated in an intelligent fashion. If general business and corporate modes of business could do the job, it would have been done all along and there would be no problem now. But clearly they did not do the job, nor show signs they consider it their responsibility, owing fealty only to the bottom line for investors, instead of being guided by price increase only equals value added to the customer, which would also sometimes pick different avenues of research and different products to create, ones that fit the customer better, even if not quite so much profit for the company.

If the powers that be insist that only the business are allowed to do the job, unless they can somehow get those corporations to do the job, the job won't get done. GNP thus remains no better, national debt keeps going up. The longer it keeps getting worse, the harder it will be to climb out of the hole. Finger pointing the blame at each other will only make it harder to eventually work together to repair the damage. Our national ship is sinking ever faster; let's get busy at least patching the holes and then go from there.