In times like these my mind wanders back to those idyllic days spent in St. Patricks elementary school, learning the 3 r's, from the Sisters of "Mercy". Of course back then if I was too idyllic, Sister Mary Pureta would break my reverie with a whack of her ruler. Yes in those impressionable years the Sisters taught me the basics of math and the important concept of negative numbers, which I found later on wasn't a good thing if it concerned your personal finances.

Back in those early years I think the highest number we got to was fifty thousand, a million had too many zero's for our little heads to comprehend, a billion was was just a word and a trillion hadn't been invented yet. A favorite past time for adults to get rid of us for a while would be tell us to go outside and count to ten thousand.

Which brings me to the President of the Peoples Republic of China, President Hu landing on American soil, being wined and dined & kowtowed to by President Obama. Ironically Obama is a past recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the current recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is a Chinese citizen who is imprisoned in a Chinese Gulag, so much for human rights.

We owe the communist country almost 1 trillion dollars in debt. On top of that we have a huge imbalance of trade with this country due to many reasons, but chiefly because we compete on an uneven playing field and no one is doing anything about it. The communist country does not have labor laws, as we know them, convict labor and children are used to manufacture cheap products. They also, with impunity, manufacture knock offs of everything ranging from designer hand bags to Ipads, flooding the markets with cheap imitation goods. They put on line a new coal fired energy plant every week, don't dare wear a white shirt while outside in Shanghai and don't even think of sticking your toe in the Huangpu River .

This choreographed visit to the US, will show a little window dressing and give a bone to Obama by the announcement that the Chinese will buy 46 billion worth of goods from the US, but that is a drop in the bucket to what needs to be done. Obama is not strong enough to impress the communist leaders, they know he is all talk, but no action, so they eat his/our lunch. The only thing that's saving us right now is that we are too big to fail for the Chinese, because we can bring them down too.

Until we get our financial house in order, balance our budget and live within our means, Hu and the Chinese communists are our daddy and will dictate to us what the next moves will be. But real fiscal sanity will not happen until the big tax and spenders are swept out of office in 2012. Until then, to put it in an old Abbott and Costello baseball simile: Hu's on 3rd ready to steal home.