This is a posting to try to put some relevance to the financial crisis and the upcoming government bail out. The long-term solutions are simple: education; campaign and lobby reform; and transparency.

The financial crisis has made a few things even more evident. However, neither political party nor candidate will figure out. So, let me.

First, we need education reform. We seem, notice I said “seem”, to be getting dumber. On one level, the uninformed American public is a big cause of the financial mess. As some right-wing critics have said, “No one put a gun to their head and made them sign for an adjustable rate mortgage.” True. But many of us have never been educated enough to understand the consequences or prepare ourselves for such a risk.

And I’m not just talking about our kids. I had a number of calls this week from folks who want to know if their investment accounts are insured by the FDIC.

One solution: Every high school student – and their parents — must take 12 hours of financial literacy before he or she can graduate. That would include something as simple as balancing a check book to understanding what stocks and bonds are. This might give us some basics in creating and maintain wealth and how it pertains to risk.

On a higher education level, we need to make education – especially science education — a top priority. We’re getting our lunches handed to us by China, India, and Japan. The education gap will continue to grow and be more noticeable in the years and decades to come with more financial crises unless something is done. Yes, tax credits and other financial help are needed. Unfortunately, neither candidate is really talking about this.

Instead, they’re talking about problems that relate only to the special interests that fund their campaigns. Mainly they’re helping the extreme wings of their parties. Notice the silliness when Sarah Palin was named VP candidate. The same arguments that were used for and against Hillary Clinton were then traded for each other’s use. They talked about lipstick and a bridge to nowhere rather than problems affecting the everyday person.

Just as we can’t assume the American public is entirely stupid, we can’t assume that the elected officials of our country are entirely corrupt. They’re not. They just work in a corrupt system that forces them to be corrupt. Take the collapse of Fannie and Freddie. These are government sponsored enterprises created by the government. But the companies executives hired lobbyists to convince Congress to increase their limits despite concerns.  And when the companies failed, Congress and the Administration had the taxpayers bail out the company.

So, secondly, we must stop allowing candidates to raise money for campaigns. Period. Until we do, we won’t have leaders who work for the people instead of just their party or funders.

As part of that, we need to restrict lobbyists’ access to elected officials. I’m not saying lobbyists aren’t important. They provide an informational service to candidates. That’s fine. But they should only meet with elected officials in open meetings – not behind closed doors.

We certainly would not be in the problems today if the financial, oil, and auto industries had been denied unfettered access to this Administration and many members of Congress.

Furthermore, no lobbyist can work for a political campaign.

And, let’s cut the campaign season to three months. No candidate can officially file for office until July of an election year. The primaries will be held in July for all states. The conventions will be held in August. And then there will be two months of campaigning with weekly debates.

Some of you will say such a proposal bucks decades of tradition. I know you all want to enjoy the Iowa Caucuses in February’s snow or March’s Super Tuesday. But remember this year? The political parties had no problem switching the primaries for their own purposes, did they?

Here’s my reason for chopping the political season. Our elected officials spend too much time campaigning when they should be working for us. Think about this. What if you hired someone who spent half the time convincing you to not fire them instead of doing the job? You’d fire them without question.

Sure, that’s less time for journalists to vet these candidates and possibly more latitude for the candidates to get away with distortions. However, if we have elected officials working more than campaigning, we might get more intelligent debates about critical issues with more in depth solutions.

Yes, I know: fat chance.

That leads to the final solution that will never be used: transparency.

Businesses need new regulations that will force them to explain things to us in simple terms. For example, read your credit card bill. One, you don’t have the time. Two, you can’t make sense of it. But you could be paying some hidden fees that add up.

Remember, when I said Americans “seem” to be dumber. They’re not necessarily dumb; they’re too busy — and companies take advantage of that.

On a more complicated level, our financial industry needs much more transparency. I won’t get into credit default swaps or other derivatives here. Try reading John Mauldin’s column called Front Line Thoughts. He explains it much better.

However, don’t mistake transparency for over-regulation. The financial industry has created many good products that can provide liquidity for companies and the economy. Sure, they have risk. But risk is good. However, we really need to know what the risk really is. Part of the problem with the current financial crisis is that we don’t know the amount of losses being held by the financial institutions.

You see, it all comes full circle. If we demand financial education from the public and more transparency from corporate America, then maybe we can convince our elected officials to do the same.

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