Grace Ross’s book tells us what we perhaps should’ve already known:
We the regular people who make up Main St. are absolutely smart enough to understand what’s going on.
In addition, we are smart enough to carry out our birthright: to be the deciders, to be the government by and for us.
Main St. $marts walks us through the underlying economics and ramp up to this crisis – pointing out what we already suspect. We know from life experience what is going on better than the wealthy that now run our government and giant corporations. Our economy depends upon our ability to work and have enough money to live and spend comfortably. In fact, the more regular people can participate in our economy, the better it runs.
Main St. $marts asks us to put aside some of the key assumptions that we’ve been told over and over again by those who’ve been running our country over the last few decades. We may have been told these key ideas were reality but they were never our reality.
Grace Ross does this in the context of laying out the fundamentals of economics and the major policies that have set the stage for the economic mess that we’re in. She talks about the immediate ramp up to the crisis in international lending and the present day damage caused by the foreclosure crisis. She addresses key choices that have been made – and could be made – in health care, education, and our prison system. She lays out specific examples of economic choices by our government that could make an immediate difference in our lives and also turn around the economic future of our state and our state government.
Grace Ross walks us through a few familiar examples, pointing out the implications for future choices. And then she walks us through the economic future we could build, looking at the real engine of our economy. It is the economic activities of regular people that make or break our economy: our jobs, our spending. It is local economic activity and small businesses. She looks at how we can use finding solutions to problems of our daily lives: the distances we travel for work, the distance from our homes to where we purchase most of our goods and the lost time with our family and children. She points out how solving those problems and the environmental challenges that lay before us offers guidelines for the larger solutions as we rebuild an economy that will work in the long run for all of us.
Grace Ross does all of this in the context of pointing out perhaps the most fundamental economic truth that our present elected officials and economic advisers pretend to ignore:
70 percent of our economy depends on the spending of regular people—you and me. So long as we are unable to spend even enough money for our most basic survival, nothing can turn around our economy. Government choices and policies drained money out of the lives of regular people, working people, middle class people, our local businesses and municipalities.
Once policy-makers and government refocus their attention on the policies and choices that will help us collectively rebuild our lives, then a new future is possible. Not only our government but our entire economy and future health depend upon being by and for us, Main St., the regular people.
For more about Grace Ross, please go to www.GraceRoss.org.
To get involved in creating the change discussed in Main St. $marts, please go to www.GraceTeamMass.org.