I hope you took the time as a good citizen (a.k.a. a Christian fulfilling their responsibilities) to listen to the President’s news conference last night.  I don’t know if we should be surprised or not that he answers the hard questions just like any politician.  Specifically, he ducks and dodges them and talks about everything else.  It seems that being a politician means you have an answer for everything except the question you were asked.  Those who ignored this great demonstration of avoiding the issues are the people who still think he is the ultimate answer to the problems that have plagued our country for decades.  Hello!  The problem happens to be the politicians in Washington regardless of their party affiliation.  That is why you and I must pray faithfully for our country and its leaders every day.

     President Obama started out with the usual plea for his programs as the answer to all our problems.  What strikes me is that these were the same programs he was espousing on the campaign trail a year before the economic problems surfaced.  Now, miraculously, the agenda and programs he was pushing are the very ones that will fix our economy.  What are the odds?  Only now, we need to spend a lot more money on those programs and right now!

     I am wondering how much longer everything will be the fault of the Bush Administration?  I believe that leaders need to get up and take the helm without looking back and blaming someone else for the work they have ahead of them.  He knew exactly what was going on and yet he still wanted to be the President of the United States.  So why is does he keep complaining about the work he asked to take over?  Did Bush make some mistakes?  Sure he did, and so will every other administration that lands in the White House.  It is impossible not to make the monumental mistakes we see the politicians making, but I will come back to this later.

     One of the things that really scared me was the issue of the Government taking over non-banking businesses when they “threaten the economy.”  I hope you recognized this as the incredible slippery slope it is.  I could not believe I was listening to our government talk about nationalizing businesses at will.  The plan calls for oversight by the Federal Reserve Board (http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE52N49J20090325?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews), but we all know how easily regulation changes with the partisan winds of Washington.  I don’t want the government running the firm who holds my 403b.  I have seen what they have done with  my social security and I am not impressed.

      The market and the law of the invisible hand still works, but we avoid their workings by intervening and helping people escape their consequences.  Instead of wrestling with the executives of AIG over bonuses, we should have allowed them to fail and those executives lose their jobs.  The government could have then salvaged the mess by finding responsible companies to take the assets over and we might have spent less money than we did.  Instead, the government wants to do what they do the worst, conduct business.  I hope you mention to your senators and representatives that the government does not need to be taking over businesses in the market.  Let them succeed or fail by their work and not our tax dollar funded bailouts.  If the government wants to increase regulation on these businesses, then do it because we all know they are really good at that.  It’s bad enough that you regulate them, but don’t make it worse by trying to nationalize them.

     It would have been nice tonight if we had the change President Obama talked about so much.  One nice change would be honesty and not treating the American people like they are stupid.  He was asked point blank if he would sign the budget if it did not have the tax cut for middle class Americans.  He never answered the question - never.  It would have been nice to have had some refreshing honesty, but we did not.  When pressed, he said he had not seen the final budget from congress.  That was not the question.  If he did not want to answer then he should have said so.  What has changed?

      So why do our politicians make such bad decisions?  Well, this is exactly what we have been talking about.  The mistakes are made because the politicians who become president do not take the job to meet the needs of the people, but to have a platform for their agenda.  Remember, the very things we need to fix all our economic problems are the very things President Obama wanted to do all along.  God was right about a national leader when He spoke to the nation of Israel in 1 Samuel 8:10-22.  God basically said, the king will be all about himself, and not you. 

     Mr. President, I fear you are becoming our king.