>The task that no politician wants to take on is to delve into what caused these businesses to do this. First, it is dang near impossible to compete with countries whose standard of living is way below ours.

I agree completely, but it is not just a lower standard of living, it’s also a near complete absence of employee rights and protection from abuse by employers. No equivalent of the EPA and all of the associated environmental considerations and requirements... the list probably goes on forever.

>...Congress and the State legislators. They have so badly screwed up our economy with their petty class-warfare, scare tactics, over regulation, unwieldy tax policies, outlandish lawsuits, no tort reform [they are all mostly lawyers so go figure], ad nauseum.

Mark, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on over-regulation and Enron, Worldcom, etc. How about the out-of-court settlement between Sun Microsystems and Kodak - why should they not be obliged (i.e. regulated) to disclose any settlement that causes them to subsequently post a loss?

>It's fairly easy to levy tarrifs on imports, but how do you go about levying tarrifs on phone services?

Take the example of Dell Corporation placing its call centers in India (or wherever). This constitutes an importation of services and should be subject to considerable customs duty – to the extent that cost savings alone would no longer be the overarching factor in any decision making process. Determining the amount of services imported could be reduced to the number and duration of calls made – a trivial matter for the telecom provider.

With regard to the debates in general, I found most of the questions to be wanting. And who is behind allowing everything to be reduced to pop culture - nothing longer than 3 minutes. I would dearly love to see Bush talk without a teleprompt, prepared speech or wireless device between the shoulder blades on any subject of political relevance for, lets say, 20 minutes. That is when you get to see who can grasp the true complexity of today’s society, and not the everything-is-black-and-white dumbed down spewings of Bush