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12/2/10

You Can Quote Me On That

We're tinkering with the steering wheel when the engine needs repair...

All of the printing of money with Quantitative Easing, Treasury Bond purchasing, tax schemes and budget cutting, extending unemployment benefits, mortgage work-out plans, social programs, ad nauseam, cannot resolve our overall economic problems unless two underlying factors are realistically addressed:

1. High unemployment due to mismatch of the skills of many job-seekers and what employers need now and will need in the future. This requires people becoming cutting-edge skilled, free-agents and/or self-employed. Eight million jobs aren't coming back because they aren't needed any more, we should be preparing for what is and will be needed. The economy can only be stimulated with significant earned income

2.   The foreclosure and indebtedness problem of individuals, organizations and government. How the lenders reconcile what people owe and how much houses are worth and deal with uncollateralized debt and collect it, is still an open question that must be resolved, in order for any across-the-board financial restructuring to occur. If a large segment of the population has no earned income due to unemployment, how do they repay the debt?

2 comments:

  1. I love your quote. Not just because it's so appropriate, but also because it gives me memories of the Cash For Clunkers debacle; this administration (and the people who adhere to its "wisdom") is so dense that they think the best thing for a perfectly good engine is to permanently render it useless. They were so sure of that, that they felt the need to prove it. And, to paraphrase Don Henley, "Jesus, people bought it."

    Anyway, enough digression... I am going to boil them down into one phrase you use in each of them: earned income.

    You can Quantitatively Ease all you want, and all you'll end up with is a $56 pack of Doublemint gum...and it goes completely in the opposite direction of paying off debt; it puts those debts way past out-of-sight. Anyone with a slice of brain in their head knows that when there's more of something it's generally worth less. I could go on and on about this but it's...well, redundant.

    I think the best thing the working class (and I mean non-union people like myself, too) can do right now is make a vow NEVER to think that the government sees any of us as human beings. We are the mule that makes their dreamy spread-the-wealth crap possible, and they can say they want us to have health care, etc., but the truth is they do not give the slightest damn about any of us as individuals. That seems like a good thing to ingrain in one's mind, at least to me.

    Beyond that, though, I am struck with thoughts of the Civil War again, in the context that if THAT war couldn't destroy this country, a few years of idiocy probably can't either.

    I know an awful lot of this sounds negative, but I expect we'll make our way through it all. Eight million lost jobs might turn into 200,000 entrepreneurs, some of whom work solo and some of whom might employ 50,000 people eventually. I'm curious as to what the catalyst will be, but I think there will be one.

    This was about the cruddiest comment ever; I'm rambling and I'm sorry for that. I really do think the quote is spot-on, though.

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  2. You should write a blog post based on this comment...seriously. Good stuff.

    The people who've been saying that the government wants to enslave us have been written off as kooks for a couple of decades but I've always thought there was an element of truth in it. The Political Class is basically hungry for the tax money the way a capitalist is for profit, only somehow the government crowd seems lazy and ineffective as individuals at that.

    We probably are headed for some type of civil war, whether shots will be fired or the politicians are given one helluva bum's rush, has yet to be seen. I think too many people are resenting the government intrusion and seeing it as having gone way too far now. Time will tell how it plays out.

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