As near as I can tell the current course the country is on may cost me well over $100,000 in stock-market losses, property value losses and additional income taxes. I, therefore, am extremely angry with our politicians. I think President Bush started all this and President Obama carried it to the extreme. The money my wife and I will lose is our own. We didn’t inherit what we have.

I have been a Marine, worked in the business world for 3M and been a school administrator for 29 years. I have worked with and for talented people and mediocre people. Bush and Obama lean toward the mediocre.

The Alden School District has acquired two new businesses in the last year or so, three new houses and an addition to the local school building. Does that sound like a distressed area to you?

Bailouts? Please! President Obama’s crew thinks that they can run a business. Who are they to decide who should run GM? Who are they to determine how much Chrysler should spend for advertising? Who are they to determine employee salaries? I fully realize they can dictate those terms on the bailout money, but what do they know about running car companies? Good Lord, five of them couldn’t even figure out how much they owed in income taxes.

Does either president understand capitalism? That system generally rewards people who work hard and play by the rules and punishes people who don’t. Why didn’t they just let the bankruptcy laws work?

Why should the 12 adult members of my family help pay off mortgages of those who bought property they could not afford?

I have some money saved to invest somewhere once they quit interfering with the markets. If I choose to be a bondholder I don’t want done to me what was done to Chrysler bondholders. Instead of being first in line in bankruptcy, they were somehow put closer to the end of the line.

Why do the term “government thuggery” appear in this context in so many articles on the Internet?

President Bush was criticized for doubling the national debt. Some in the press have said that President Obama will triple the debt left by Bush. That is a six-fold increase over what Bush inherited. Isn’t that insane?

Various economists estimate that the coming national debt will result in an additional tax burden of $10,000 to $30,000 on every man, woman and child currently alive. Maybe those numbers are not realistic. What if they are? Is the cure worse than the disease?

Our current treasury secretary was laughed at by a large group of students in China when he told then that the dollar was strong. Does that not give you pause to consider the direction the country is headed in? Why does the government think we can borrow and spend our way out of this situation? If that were the formula for financial success, I would have followed it long ago.

Elwood Guanella

Alden