How To Stimulate the Economy 101

1. Make something and sell it.

Be more than a consumer. Be a creator. Contribute goods or services to the marketplace. Be an entrepreneur.


2. Buy something from your local entrepreneur.

Support your friendly neighborhood maker of things or provider of services. Put dollars back into your local economy by being a patron of those who create, even if they are “just kids.”


3. Advocate for more arts and design instruction in our childrens' schools.

In the post-No Child Left Behind era in the United States and its narrow focus on reading scores, math tests, and closing the “achievement gap,” the American education enterprise is sorely in need of strategies to jump-start the ability of youngsters to innovate, invent, and think entrepreneurially during their years as K-12 students. We are missing a crucial window for investing in our economy long-term through the cultivation of young peoples’ potential to learn to think across the arts, design, architecture, and information technology disciplines. The great breakthroughs of the 21st century in areas like technology, communications, product invention or urban design are likely to be made by those most familiar with practices of innovation through having been provided early opportunities to do so. Starting interdisciplinary educational studies in college is too late to begin learning to team-think and innovate. A quality art education is also a design education.


4. Save so as to fill the storehouses, then share what you have stored.

Proverbs 30:25-
Ants are creatures of little strength,
yet they store up their food in the summer;

Americans need to save money again, but money should only be saved to be put to better use later. The Bible gives us a model. Ants don’t buy on credit. They have a practice of storing up what they will need.


5. Pray for a pragmatist President.

The "United" States is full of ideologues on the political right and on the political left, pulling us apart. The problem with ideologues, whether they are conservative or liberal, is that they refuse to admit that there is more than one way to arrive at the very same destination. Or worse, they are blind to the varying routes that many others are traveling on their paths as Americans. Only God gets to say, “This is the only way…follow me. Period.” As for us humans, we are merely feeling our way through this present darkness and we need to hold one another’s hands. That’s why, in divisive times, we need a President who is a pragmatist, someone with the confidence and strength to stand in the gap between the right and the left and help to reconcile the republic.

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.