2012 Help Wanted: Economists Needed to Repair Roof

I am not a Presidential candidate, nor do I play one on TV. My patriotic duty, if I choose to exercise it, will be to select a candidate in a few days who I believe will protect and foster my country's best interests. I am well-educated, worldly, open-minded, unaffiliated with a political party, and a chasm away from the 1% or the 47%. I routinely make complex decisions and have no issue moral or otherwise committing my support to one candidate. And I am by no means alone.

Like in many past elections, rather than selecting the best candidate for the position from thousands of qualified men and women, I find myself once again facing the much more difficult task of having to select the best (or least worst?) of two. No television commercial, email blast, tweet, or social media onslaught can help them now. I'm too demoralized and campaign-weary.

I apologize to those who have championed a cause but I do not accept rhetoric, statistics, or unsubstantiated claims of either Party as Gospel. I know both parties spin the truth to suit their agendas in hopes to sway voters. I do not believe that casting a vote should be tantamount to guessing who tells the fewest lies. But this is our political process and there is nothing we can do to change it at the moment.

What we can do is select the most crucial issue facing our nation and make our decision upon that, and the state of the economy seems to have won quite the mandate on that selection process. The Economy has topped the list of a majority of voters this election, including mine and it will be upon this that I will cast my vote.

Let's personalize it for a moment. If there was a leak in your roof, you'd hire a roofer. And if there were time, you'd interview a few and see how they planned to fix the leak and what it would cost. Well the Economy has a gaping hole in its roof though it seems the rain has been stopped at least temporarily from coming in with a tarp (or TARP as it were, if you see where I'm going with this.)  One candidate has experience doing it as President but though the hole is smaller, rain continues to fall in. The other is a businessman governor who appears to be more experienced fixing financial holes yet presents no bulleted plan or facts on how to get that hole repaired faster.  

I am not an economist, nor do I approve when Presidential candidates play one on TV.  Many factors affect the economy's health but I will not claim to know which are more important indicators because I am unequivocally unqualified to do so. That's what economists are meant to do yet the opinions of to no avail. Where are the ones without agendas? Ones that believe in doing what's best for the country regardless of political affiliation?
 
Perhaps rather than fixing holes, they're all busy digging one underground in which to live.

Article first published as Help Wanted: Economists Needed to Repair Roof on Technorati. 

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