If you think the mortgage crisis is bad, wait until the credit card crisis hits! This country is carrying a HUGE credit card debt. If people stop paying their cards, banks will fail, etc. I am not a doom and gloom kind of guy, but I think this is going to get a whole lot worse before (if) it gets better. The only way we are going to crawl out of this is if we drill on our own lands. "Green" fuel is great, but there isn't the infrastructure to support it. No one will be able to sell lots of green cars until the infrastructure is in place. If companies can't afford to truck the raw materials to build the infrastructure, the whole thing is a mute point. I didn't think I'd be saying this, but we need to get our troops home, shore up the porous borders, get the hell out of the UN, and start becoming self-sufficient again. Trade with China needs to slow or stop. Lets face it-we don't need 10,000,000,000 little Chinese toys at McD's and Burger King. We don't need all the little crappy toys in the grocery store. That country will poison us all and just come ashore on the west coast.
Oh, and I haven't seen $5/gallon yet. :-laf