TVSquad

Judging from the amount of hyperbole being used each day on The Drudge Report, it appears that the nation might be sliding into an economic downturn. While a lot of you might be worried about this, I'm completely confident that the current presidential brain-trust will solve the problem and in no way will it lame-duck its way through the next seven months, leaving the economy's problems for the next poor schlub who gets elected.

So while most of the big media outlets focus on silly, soon-to-be-solved problems like "the economy." I've moved on to bigger and better things. In fact, I believe I have found the number one problem facing the next president and some practical advice on how he might be able to fix it. This is a problem that affects democrats and republicans, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the black and the white. I'm talking, of course, about...

My father is a former economics major who spent 30 years as a mortgage banker before starting his own company (which does economical things so complex that to my simple mind, they might as well be magical). One of the things that constantly irks him is the loaded language that the nightly news uses to describe our economic situation: words like "crisis," "downturn," and, worst of all "recession."

Now, anybody who has spent more than forty seconds online in the last six months can see that we are, more than likely, in the middle of a recession brought on by a downturn in the real estate market because of the current credit crisis. That said, I'd like to ask the question: would we be better off if TV simply lied to us about all of these things?

(S02E02) I think a better title for this episode would be "Outsourcing--Where's the Outrage?"

As we all know, many jobs in the United States, mostly in the computer programming and telemarketing sectors, have been outsourced to foreign companies, mainly to India. Outsourcing continues to be a hot topic in this country, and I think it would be safe to say that the majority of American workers abhor the idea of an American-based company outsourcing American jobs to another country in order to save on labor costs and increase their own profits. I'm sure there are plenty of people who say outsourcing is a good thing, but I haven't been able to find them.

This was one of those situations where you hear that someone has died, and that they hosted a show that is no longer on the air, and you think, "I thought that show was still on the air?"

Louis Rukeyser hosted Wall Street Week on PBS from 1970 to 2002. He was also a writer and lecturer, and worked for years at ABC as a correspondent. He died yesterday of multiple myleloma,  a bone cancer.