Market forces more meaningful than stimulus checks

The economy is likely to be a big topic of tonight's presidential debate, with each of the candidates offering one sort of fix or another.

While they propose tax cuts, stimulus packages or combinations of the two, there's one point of evidence that the free market is much more competent at regulating itself than any Washington program.

It's one of those good news, bad news scenarios.

You know the bad news, if you own any stocks or pay attention to your mutual funds or 401K. Americans have lost $6.4 trillion in paper wealth in the last year, with the Dow Jones average below 10,000, the lowest its been in four years.

That loss has been felt around the world -- as one English financial worker told us recently, "When America catches cold, we get pneumonia."

That's the bad news.

The good news is, the slowing economy has reduced the demand for oil, dropping the price from last July when it hit $147.27, down below $90 a barrel earlier this week.

In addition, the hurricane season, which affected oil production less than the speculators predicted, is winding down.

It always seems to take much longer for the price of gasoline to drop in McCook with declines in the price of oil -- at least as compared with increases in the price of oil -- but we should be seeing some more declines shortly.

Gasoline is already selling for less than $3 in parts of Kansas, and is only slightly above that level in parts of Nebraska. That's more than a dollar a gallon lower than the high we paid earlier this year.

That economic stimulus check most of us got was nice, but once it was gone, it was gone. A 25 percent reduction in the price of commuting is a much more meaningful bonus -- and didn't involve any vote of Congress nor an increase in our national debt.