Think the economy is bad now?  Go back a generation.  The prime rate was 20 percent.  Unemployment was nearly 11 percent.  And to top it off, we had been humiliated in Vietnam just a few years before.

President Reagan turned the economy around with his optimism.  Unlike Bush, he didn't have a Republican (much less a conservative) congress.  But he did have the power of persuasion.  No, he couldn't reduce government spending the way he had hoped.  But he cut taxes, a lot, far more than Bush has done.  Reagan also deregulated.

There's no reason that McCain can't make the case for smaller government and less taxes.  People want change.  Under Bush, the Federal Budget has increased from two trillion to nearly three trillion per year.  And that's not counting the bailout.  We need more of that?

Fortunately, we didn't get all the government we paid for.  Our roads haven't been rebuilt.  It still takes forever for the government to process anything.  There's lots of bad loans, thanks to government oversight. 

No, what the government is good at we don't need.  We don't need more bureaucrats having more committee meetings or creating yet another form for us to fill out and for the government to mis-file. We don't need more government "workers" sleeping at their desk or watching TV.  We've got more than enough of that.

We definitely don't need more government regulation.  The idea that some slug bureaucrat is going to outsmart someone who knows how to make $100,000,000 a year is pretty funny.  Instead, regulation will mean all the law abiding citizens will have to fill out more forms and stand in more lines and pay more and get less for whatever is being regulated.

When we deregulated the airline industry, a generation ago, prices fell by almost 50 percent.  And there are now far more flights to far more places than there ever were.  When the government deregulated the phone industry, long distance charges dropped a lot and technological innovation boomed.

Regulation today means higher healthcare costs, more expensive food, higher energy costs, a bankrupt banking industry, and more expensive housing and offices.

So let's use this economic crisis to set the American worker free.  Let's declare unilateral, unconditional free trade with every country on earth.  Let's roll-back government spending to two trillion dollars.  Let's reduce the top marginal tax rates on individuals and companies to twenty percent, and let's make that a consumption tax.  Let's end the death tax and capital gains.

Let's give every parent a $9,000 voucher for each child each year and watch the quality of our education bloom like it never has before.  Let's stop funding and regulating colleges and watch the quality improve there, too.  Let's stop regulating the insurance industry, the healthcare industry, the farming industry, the oil industry, and right on down the line.

Our country will prosper like never before and this crisis will fade away like a small puff of smoke on a windy day.