Picked this audiobook up from the library. There are lots of good well-told bible stories: Joseph and Jeremiah. The author may have been a good preacher or deacon of the sort. I never heard the Bible stories told so well.

The author tries to awake the readers’ sense of urgency by asking this question: “Do we love ourselves more than our children?” That’s a powerful question. Unfortunately, most of the people who caused all these crises in our nation are people who love themselves and probably their children than others’ children. His appeal to the business leaders may be the right call to actions as the politicians are not going to do anything about them.

A couple of good ideas that were presented: 1. 1~2 years of mandatory public services by our young adults. This is an excellent idea to inject a sense of civil service to our society and can help re-program our children away the “poisons.” I like it. But is it political feasible? I doubt it. 2. more use of nuclear power generation – one of the better ways to get us out of the petroleum dependency. 3. Bite the bullet to pay off the debts with a national transaction tax of 2%.

The author covers all aspects of the issues facing this nation: debts, business renewal, social security, medicare, inflation, international relationship, technology leadership or loss, terrorism, environments, energy and etc. Obviously, the author has immersed himself in many of the issues and courageously propose solutions for them. Some of the solutions make sense to me but some don’t. But at least he is presenting solutions.

The author at the end projects two possible scenarios like the movie “It’s a wonderful world”: one without a turn-around when America goes into to a permanent decay, the other with the national debts got under control and a future reborn for the country. I think America will probably end up somewhere between the two extreme cases – a slow decay. I hope not to see within my life time the end of the greatest democracy experiment in human history.