Brokaw: Sen. McCain, for you, we have our first question from the Internet tonight. A child of the Depression, 78-year-old Fiorra from Chicago.Since World War II, we have never been asked to sacrifice anything to help our country, except the blood of our heroic men and women. As president, what sacrifices — sacrifices will you ask every American to make to help restore the American dream and to get out of the economic morass that we’re now in?

McCain: Well, Fiorra, I’m going to ask the American people to understand that there are some programs that we may have to eliminate.

I first proposed a long time ago that we would have to examine every agency and every bureaucracy of government. And we’re going to have to eliminate those that aren’t working.

Good start. Wean the public off the guvmint teat…

I know a lot of them that aren’t working. One of them is in defense spending, because I’ve taken on some of the defense contractors. I saved the taxpayers $6.8 billion in a deal for an Air Force tanker that was done in a corrupt fashion.

Gawd, more pol talk. Obama was worse.

Here’s a column by Doug McIntyre that offers a better answer than either.

A spoiled nation faces meals without dessert

I have an eye on a couple of businesses down the block from my house. I’m not rooting for them to fail, but I’ve pegged them as my personal canaries in the coal mine. One is a bead shop; the other, a mobile dog groomer.

I’ll know the economy has truly tanked when the bottom falls out of the bead biz and Fluffy and Snowball get their bath the old-fashioned way - by licking themselves or being blasted by the garden hose.

It’s none of my business what you do with your money, but sometimes it’s hard not to wonder who shops in some of these places. How bad could the economy really be when the Topanga Mall has something like 15 jewelry stores, including a Cartier’s and a Tiffany’s?

So the rest of you can watch Jim Cramer scream his lungs out while the Dow plunges, but I’ve got my gaze fixed on the bead shop and doggy salon. When the “For Rent” signs go up, I’ll know the economy is down, and sanity has returned to the marketplace.

We really have been buying like fools for years. We shopped till we dropped and in the process dropped logic and basic common sense. “No payments until January 2020!” “No money down!” “Easy Credit!” “No Income Verification!” What universe did we think we were living in?

I think it was ol’ Herbert Hoover whose campaign wanted “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but I doubt Hoover ever thought that car would be a Mercedes 500 or a Porsche SUV. (The chicken, by the way, is organic and the pot hand-forged from titanium by Swedish supermodels.) Yes, we’ve lived the good life so long we’ve turned into veal. It will be hard to explain to future anthropologists how in 21st-century America the rich are thin and the poor fat and how the average American feels put out because the airlines now charge to watch the crappy in-flight movie. It wasn’t that long ago we had to dig out of 25percent unemployment and the Dust Bowl and fight the Germans and the Japanese. We had scrap-metal drives, rationing of butter and gas, and a universal draft that hauled 11million off to war.

Read on.