You know the old liberal and conservative approach to economics is dead. Do you shovel money to governments to create mismanaged short term jobs or reward large corporations with sole sourced contracts that deliver nothing but inferior performance at a higher price or as we've seen in Iraq, no performance? The only way for our economy to fully recover is to create jobs from the bottom up by helping to fire up small businesses. It is the only way for our economy to expand creating millions of jobs based on consumer demand. Japan seeds their small businesses and provides money even to companies like Toyota? Why can't the the U.S. government start helping to build a solid foundation of jobs by providing grants, low credit loans and seed money to secure the new markets before we just hand them over to China?

We're already behind in battery technology that is an emerging energy market that we can't lose or LED technology that uses 10 percent of the energy of conventional incandescents. How about solar energy that Scientific American claims in the near future could power every home and business in the country even if we all own plug ins. We could utilize southwestern States where the sun shines almost daily, rebuild our aging grid and eliminate coal powered plants. Where are all of our creative gung ho Americans ready to take back our place in the world market?

Just like Japan companies do during down turns, we need to retool to scrape back the competitive edge in shrinking markets. The U.S. has to focus on providing seed money to those small businesses that with a kick start will provide R&D capital to speed up development. We could utilize the SBA to set guidelines utilizing business plans of 3 to 5 years to set the criteria. SBA sets up the program but lenders run and approve it based meeting the requirements. New businesses would be encouraged with funding for start up help and good business plans. Grants and very low interest loans could kick start a slew of new businesses. It's time we level the playing field. Cost is always a roadblock to new technologies and we need to skip a beat and get these to mass production as soon as possible to drive down costs.

If the Feds do provide their mix of infrastructure contracts, these government entities that get this money must have incentive contracts for this work. The more on time projects are done, the more they get paid. And if they don't have public servants that can do a decent government estimate for price reasonableness, then they need to contract out to the private sector to assure the tax payer gets the quality required at the fair price. We need some of these projects but we don't want Federal, State and local governments peeing our money down the drain. If they're Federal contracts, they should be awarded to small businesses unless it's determined none are capable based on the project.

Last but not least, yes we need some short term tax relief and some way to assist the more then 2 million Americans wuo have lost their jobs in the last year. We need an extension of some unemployment benefits and modest tax cutw to weather the storm. As we saw with the Bush stimulous plan, it didn't help and it never made sense to me why conservatives think the short term solution is better the spending it on some job creation. At least you get something back from you investment.

So, where will we start come January and February of 2009. We gave all the money back to the top after they ripped us off, we replenished their capital with no questions asked, and the credit market is still seized up...theye won't borrow our money. It's time to start from the bottom up to build a strong foundation for growth and to take back American ingenuity for the 21st. century markets.