Our jobs have been sent overseas or given to visa holders who help to send them overseas.

Even though the U.S. is not legally required to issue a single H-1B Visa (Yes, that's right not a single one), we will give away another 65,000+ US high-tech jobs via next Wednesday's U.S. CIS H-1B Non-Immigrant lottery. U.S. workers and U.S. taxpayers will be the April Fools.

Outsourcing and the High-Tech/Skilled Worker Visa giveaway have decimated our economy, our tax base, and our nation's future.

Having a college degree and not being able to find a job is an intellectual asset gone toxic.

I do admire your journalism. It's great to see a level head during these choppy times.

Actually, I think that the government shouldn't partner with private on these assets if they don't want to partner with us. These guys have an attitude problem. The old culture is shifting and a new culture is developing.

Honestly, I would have the government sell those assets in a way that they would profit. At the market. Get the fire started and going. No one is going to be able to resist some of these prices for too long and I'm sure a feeding frenzy will begin. Then prices will settle at some point which we need to have happen.

I think that some of those assets, like foreclosed homes, should be given in a lottery to some of the people who really need them.

But I think that the vast majority of the profits from selling the assets should be set into a rainy day fund, that we desperately need to have in this country, and should be grown until we can run our government off the investments and thus lower our taxes.

I think we've reached the point where taxes are getting too high and people are out of touch with that in many ways. There's no room to raise taxes to pay for all of the things that we need to in the budget. We have to get more savings going from replacing our oil and power in the government to cheaper alternative sources.

I think that we should be selling bonds to pay for switching over our power sources to other than oil. The American public is so fed up with oil. Enough to give you driving and be really disgusted with the lot of it. This of course affects the car industry deeply. No one saw it coming. Public sentiment is get me out of here, I don't need to see $150.00 oil ever again. Don't need it.

I think we stand to make so much money potentially from switching out of oil that we could get the injection we need to re-shape our economy. Enough is enough. The people have spoken. They want fewer bankers and certainly regulation in the financial industry. Reasonably priced housing. Accountability and transparency.

But what's happening in banking also has to happen in healthcare. It's the same synrome. Premiums are going into the executives pockets. The bankers aren't the only problem, though they certainly need to get the message.

Look at New York. We can't afford to see the public transportation get any more expensive. It's outrageous, and it's choking the local economy at the worst possible time.

Sell bonds to re-tool the public transportation system.

I think that the Feds should put out bids to back these types of projects if they are taken up my municipalities. The ones who don't take the money, they are probably the insensitive, boorish, out of touch types who only see their patriotic duties extend to themselves. They are destined to become more and more isolated and there's little we can do to change them really.

But those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, they know we need some good ideas and forward thinking.

I really would like us to start setting aside monies to run the government on its own, the way those great little machines do that keep running once you get them started. Other countries have done that. It would sure stop the argument that government is too big or too small one day, which I'm sick of hearing already.

I'm sure it's got to be some particular size and we spend more time squabbling over its size than doing something about it, a complete waste of time in my view.

Job losses – we hadn't heard much of them in our area so far until yesterday when it was announced that the county's largest employer – the University of Alabama at Birmingham (school and hospital) were announcing "massive" layoffs. Any hope I had before that announcement was pretty well shattered with that one.

One item I wish your panel would discuss and put the limelight on. According to a story on the CNN site IBM is asking for a bailout while at the same time they are planning on laying off thousands of US workers and shifting the jobs to India. So the bailout money would go to pay teh salaries of people in another country – That might help IBM but it certainly doesn't help Americans and I know that I for one am totally against a company being able to do this. The bailout and stimulus money is suppose to make things better for Americans – not for foreign citizens of other countries. To me this is as bad as the AIG bonuses.

Second Issue: If they are gamblers, let them gamble on their own. If the lose, they lose and write it off. If they win, we tax.

If I only had a nickle for every time I have heard, this may be the sign we have been looking for, the turn around point, but we all know what happens when we get to that last house on the left. The only question is, will the story turn out the same as it does in Hollywood, or will it be so real to each of us that no one wants to see what is coming toward us like a frieght train loaded with toxic waste, no brakes, no conductor, and the rails lead into a brick wall at grand central station.

The Mortgage Meltdown was triggered when the ‘real’ U.S. Job Market contracted. Under-employment and unemployment put us in the position that mortgages which were once only s reasonable portion of our incomes suddenly became the bulk of our ‘reduced’ incomes. The pursuant ‘lack of purchasing power’ has sent the rest of the economy into this tailspin from which we will never recover.

It all comes down to Jobs. Jobs go to the lowest bidder. Those low bidders do not live in the U.S. We will never again have jobs that can sustain any real semblance to the U.S. we’ve know for the past 50 years. A 'green job' that pays well assumes that people have purchasing power–that's not going to happen again in this country.

I appreciate the manner in which you critique policy and the ability of politicians as opposed to the sliming so often done by contemporary "journalists".

May I respond by posing a question to you. Both high inflation and deflation of any measure are detrimental to any economy. Very mild inflation is the ideal to most economists. Leaving imaginary "toxic debt" (these esoteric derivatives which no one seems able to accurately define) aside, many homeowners see the very real (as in "real property") toxic negative equity in their homes. Individual families are trapped, literally and figuratively, in their mortgaged houses. They cannot sell their homes due to depressed house values, and they cannot maneuver within their personal debt boundaries due to skyrocketing credit card interest rates allowed by the fine print in their agreements.

Several years ago, Chairman Greenspan lowered the rate that the Fed charges on overnight loans to banks to almost zero in order to avoid having the economy begin slipping into deflation, the economic death spiral of the Great Depression. The current stimulus debt is being sold via bonds to foreign governments and to private investors. With housing values so deflated is there not the possibility of raising them through engineered inflation? I understand that prices of all goods and services would go up, but the price of all "real" property would as well. Rather than selling debt, the Fed could simply, yet also radically, increase the M1 money supply. Though consumer prices would go up for all (a shared burden), most homeowners would see an increase in the value of their homes, such that they would no longer be what is referred to as "upside down", i.e. they would have positive equity rather than negative. This might hurt the lenders who financed the current loans as the payback in real dollars would be less due to a devalued dollar. This, nevertheless, might be better for everyone than massive foreclosures. It would also free the majority of these homeowners from their debt traps, allowing them to sell current houses, move to new job locations, and have greater ability to pay down personal debt. Another seeming upside would be that it would not be debt which would have to be repaid by the government to lenders. Again, the obvious downside is a weakened dollar coupled to higher prices for all goods and services.

I know this medicine is roughly equivalent to chemotherapy in terms of its side effects, however chemo, coupled with disciplined hard work, did bring Lance Armstrong from near death to the pinnacle position in his field. I would like to hear the thoughts of your panel, who are more well economically educated than I, regarding such a course of action.

Let's hope that CNN has left the airwaves and we elect a new president in 2012.