I like to consider myself an informed person. Every weekend I watch pretty much every news show: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week with George Clintonopolous, Fox News Sunday, The Chris Matthews Show, The Journal Editorial Report. I don’t watch CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer because for some reason I really can’t put into words, Wolf irritates the heck out of me. Every night I watch ABC World News Tonight and The O’Reilly Factor. I subscribe to both Newsweek and Time and read them each week. I think I’m on top of things, and I have one piece of advice for each side of the aisle.

To Democrats: Stop talking down the economy. Yes, it’s bad. Is it the worst economic situation since the Great Depression? Not quite. Since the end of WWII, we have had only 2 recessions that lasted longer than 11 months — in 1973 and 1980. The current recession is at 12 months and counting. It looks pretty much like these other two. Will it get worse? Maybe. In fact, probably. But the whole point of the fiscal stimulus package proposed by Democrats is to FIX THINGS! To inject money into the economy and get people spending and investing again. And people are not going to do that when they get their new government jobs or tax cuts if you keep telling them to buckle up, stick their head between their legs and kiss their butt goodbye. I understood when Obama was talking down the economy before he became president: it helped him defeat McCain and kept expectations low (as his rhetoric goes from “creating jobs” to “creating or saving jobs”). But he’s the president now. You would think that politicians would be smart enough to understand that when you scare people into thinking the world is ending, they’re going to sit on whatever cash they have. I think I understand why they’re doing it — they’re not sure if what they’re doing will work, and they don’t want to overpromise; if they say they’re going to fix the economy and they don’t, they’ll lose seats in 2 years. But America voted for Obama because they wanted leadership and optimism, and right now neither of those is coming out of the Democrats in Congress.

To Republicans: Quit being so sanctimonious about deficit spending. The bill put forth by the House Democrats isn’t perfect. There are some things in there that a) aren’t immediate, and b) probably aren’t even smart. When it takes $850 billion to create 3.5 million jobs, that’s $242,857.10 per job, and that sounds pretty inefficient to me. But Republicans have absolutely no credibility when they nitpick the package and pointing out a few million here and a few million there that shouldn’t be spent. We had deficits throughout the Bush Administration, and not entirely because of national defense and the war on terror. Republicans did a horrible job of keeping pork out of bills (one of my favorites is $1,000,000 to build a parking lot for an art museum in Iowa; the museum was created with private donations, but they needed federal taxpapers to pay for the parking lot — and in Iowa, the art capital of the world.). Now that the other party is in charge, Republicans need to quit acting as if none of these little spending projects would be in them if they were in charge. They would be, and Republicans would be making excuses too about how it was necessary and would provide jobs. Let the Democrats run with this and see if it works. If it does and the economy improves, Americans will be happy, and you should be happy, too. If it doesn’t, then you’ll probably gain votes in 2 years. Some of you may be saying that you don’t want to be “the party of ‘no’” but right now, that’s exactly what you are.