Interested?  

 I actually made this suggestion on Barack Obama's new http://change.gov/  website.   I love that site.   Seriously.   All the stuff under "agenda"....especially the "Civil Rights" and "Ethics" sections.    Equal pay, open government records, public comment, woohoo!   I keep hearing people, some of them on TV, complaining that they don't know what Barack Obama is actually planning to do.  Apparently they can't read.   It's not like he's hiding it.  You don't have to have a secret decoder ring or the bleeding heart liberal password to see it.  It's right there on the Internet.

 Ahem.  I was saying.  See, the problem is that certain things that President-elect Obama wants to do that really WILL help the economy and create jobs, and which will also solve other pressing problems such as carbon emissions and the fact that our bridges are collapsing and our infrastructure is falling apart generally, also cost a lot of money.   The money part is the problem.   Congress will balk, if it does balk, at spending more money when our deficit is already so large.   So will most taxpayers.  There is some logic to this, since even though those things would pay off in the long run raising our national debt would tend to destabilize our economy further.   Among other possible hazards is runaway inflation.

 However, I have a brilliant solution to this.

 During World War II, the United States government sold war bonds.  They were sold for a percentage of their face value and had a ten-year maturity.   They were essentially a way for the government to fund the war by borrowing money from citizens...and had the added bonus of removing money from circulation and therefore controlling inflation.  Lots of people bought them, because it was considered patriotic to do so.

Obama already wants to start a bank to invest in national infrastructure, and he already wants to invest money in "green technology" and clean energy sources.   The US government already sells Treasury bonds.   We are already borrowing money from various sources (mainly other countries) to fund our various projects and needs.   What if you could buy special "Green Economy/Infrastructure" bonds that would go into the pool for investment into technology or infrastructure?   People are hungry to do something constructive.   This way they could literally "invest in America" and the US government would be borrowing from our own citizens rather than other countries.    It would make people feel like they were contributing something and solve several problems at once.

I made this suggestion already myself, but if a few more people did it, the chances of the idea being implemented might increase.    If you go to http://change.gov/, there's a way to offer your visions and ideas.  I think you should do that anyway, even if you don't plug my idea, because getting involved in your own government...a practice we like to call "democracy"...is a good thing.