I see a lot of this Lou Dobbs anti free trade rhetoric, but I hate to break it to you, but we are never going back to world of the 50's and 60's. Globalization has changed everything.

As for regulations, we have thousands of pages of them. More regulation just blindly applied will make things worse. I am for regulation, but the rules need to be cost effective, and smartly enforced.

While outsourcing has been going on, more jobs have also been created at the same time, in fact very good jobs. As for jobs in the financial industry, there are a lot of them actually. I work for a European investment bank that employees several thousand people in the US and pays them well.

I agree that lobbyists for many interests, Wall Street included, whield too much infuence, but the only way to truly lower that influence is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. The other is rewrite the tax code to remove the social engineering nonsense out of it and return it back to the original intent the founders designed. Taxes were meant to raise revenue to do those things as enumurated in the constitution, not to modify people's behavior.

The idea of centralized economic planning is idiotic, and I saw how stupid it was first hand in 1985 when I spent two weeks in the USSR.

So how do we return to prosperity?

1). Reinstate Glass Stegal, investment and commercial banks need to be seperated, the repeal of that act in 1999 was a major contributer to the mess we are in now.

2) Eliminate all taxes on labor, investments and income. Create a single consumption tax with a built in exemption for the lowest classes. This single act would create the most massive stimulus in history. Eliminating the corporate income tax alone, would easily make the US the most competative environment in the industrial world and the most attrative place to do business, that means more jobs.

3) Create an audit team to go through every rule and regulation and run a cost-benefits analysis on each one, then immediately rescind any that are out of date or duplicated. This is in fact already mandated by a law passed during the Carter era, that every decade out of date regs were supposed to be removed from the books, it is just that every President since has ignored that law.

3) Block Grant medicare and medicaid back to the states, who are frankly better able to administer these programs than the federal government.

4) Pass a law stating that that the federal government shall consume no more than 20 percent of GDP unless we are in a major military conflict. In times when the Government represented less than 20% of GDP have been the times when society as a whole was the most prosperous.

5) Redesign our education system to work with a post-industrial economy, we must teach our children to think like entreprenuers, not just workers.

6) Get rid of the Federal Reserve. The Constitution assigns Congress with the task of coining and printing money, having an unelected, quasi private organization manipulating the economy is simply putting too much power into the hands of too few, especially those few which are not held accountable to the people.

7) Eliminate all business subsidies. A business should exist because the market says it should, not because the owner has friend in congress. All farm subsidies should be eliminated as well. The vast majority of that money winds up in the hands of multibillion dollar agribusiness, to be paid to pump corn syrup into everything the kids are eating and you know where that leads.

8) Create a sensible energy policy based on realism, not the pie in the blue sky fantasy of groups like the Sierra Club. We need to in the short term develop our fossil fuel reserves here, and in the long term continue to make alternatives cost effective.