John McCain is on record as admitting that he hasn’t studied much in the way of economics. Mike Huckabee has informed us that he studied miracles, not math. (Well, who studies math -- or economics -- anymore anyway, except outside the U.S.?)

My ideal candidate has for years been Walter E. Williams, a man who knows a whole lot about economics, putting it mildly. Of course, he’ll be the first to say he hasn’t a chance of being elected to any office, given his views of the purposes of – and limitations upon – government, especially the federal government. Sadly, he's probably correct.

I mean, you'd never hear Walter Williams say something like, “If you work in America, you should not be poor” as Senator Obama has. How can one say such a thing? How can simply working for a living entitle one to membership in an economic class? Why not say, "If you work in America, you should be as wealthy as Bill Gates?" I suppose one good reason for not saying so is that if one were to say that, then people would really know you were excreting solid bovine waste.

Charles Krauthammer sums it up nicely:

[Obama's] going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow. (Here )

I wish those working poor here in the U.S. would spend a year in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. I don't mean a year visiting, on vacation. I mean move there, to try work there, get accustomed to the dirt diet that poor children there attempt to live on.

I suspect at the end of that year, when they get back here, they might have an appreciation of how good it can be to be among the working poor in the U.S. I have had such an appreciation since my childhood, from time (a lot of it!) spent in Mexico; and I don't mean the parts of Mexico where you see other gringos. You'll never see those places on a postcard.