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Well, here we are. Gas is over four bucks a gallon, school bonds won’t pass, housing market on life support, unemployment up some, and the price of everything heading higher because the fuel costs are being passed right along to consumers.

And there’s absolutely no help on the horizon judging by the two clueless people who’ve been selected to slug it out for the presidency and the likelihood that most of the likewise clueless bozos serving in Congress will be re-elected again and will continue the charade of “representing” us.

This is the biggest mess I’ve seen in my 66 years, but then I was pretty young when World War II started up. It might have been worse. But even that devastating event was marked by at least one positive thing. We had leadership and it led. President Roosevelt and then Truman led; Churchill led; Eisenhower, MacArthur and Nimitz led.

And the American people led as they flocked to enlist in the armed forces and flocked to work in the defense industries. Others planted victory gardens, collected scrap metal and other materials needed to feed the defense plants. We went on rationing. We went without cars and gasoline. I’ve still got my ration card and some ration stamps. I keep them as a reminder.

The rest went on keeping the nation going by teaching school, running stores, hospitals, factories, and doing radio programs and taking care of families while fathers were gone. America showed her best during those war years and we should remember them.

If we’re too young to have lived through it, we should be learning ourselves and teaching our kids about it. Schools should be teaching it. It was “in your face patriotism” in its finest hour.

But that was then and this is now. Want to solve the gas price thing? Fine. We have to build, repair our damaged economy and grow our way out of it.

You can’t solve it by kissing the hems of OPEC’s garments and you can’t tax or punish your way out. We’ve got to regain or replace all those quality jobs we exported with new quality jobs. Not burger-flipping jobs. We have to do something about the staggering national debt that continuously drags the value of our dollar lower and lower, and grow our economy in ways not measured by corporate profits.

If we do that, then the price of gas begins to fit within our budgets again. If we don’t, we’ll never recover.

But maybe nobody really wants to recover. If you do, I think you’d have demanded better nominees for president. Perhaps some people with practical ideas instead of goofy ones or empty rhetoric.

Let me give you an example here at home in Anacortes of how a problem can be solved. It just takes leadership. Let’s consider the failed school bond.

Voted bonds are paid with property taxes. No one wants theirs to go up so we have to get more property to tax. That’s either done by annexing more into the city or adding value to what’s here by improving it by building new stuff or remodeling the old.

Take MJB’s 80 or so acres of mostly vacant property down along the water. If you developed it for plain old residential use, you’d get around 320 lots with houses, each worth say $400,000. That’s $128 million of taxable property. If you developed it for retail or office use, it might be worth even more.

Using the residential model and current school district tax levy of $1.7961 per thousand of assessed value, that brings in a new $230,000 in new tax revenues just for the school district. It also brings in more for the city, county, state, port, hospital, etc. and it makes the tax base much bigger so voted bonds don’t take such a big bite out of everyone. In other words, it spreads out the load.

So why isn’t the MJB property developed? I know why and you may have a theory of your own. None of them is important. What is important is that development needs to happen on that property and that’s going to take leadership on someone’s part.

If you want to solve this country’s problems, that’s going to take real leadership too, not pie in the sky and higher taxes.

Therefore, my message to anyone who seeks my vote or seeks to represent me in any niche of government from now on and from the very top on down is “lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

Time is indeed running out!