Funny flag for Hagbard #19. Spud, control yourself. lol
On topic... the one Republican who seemed to have his head on straight, Huntsman, was never really in the game. So here we are. Sheesh.
I understand anger. I think we have all felt it - and still do. We're all frustrated at the economy, the conflicts overseas, and the inability of Washington to get things back to normal. But there is no easy answer -- not from your candidate, or my candidate, or some magical third-party candidate. We got into this mess through years, or actually decades, of careless policy on both sides of the aisle, along with forces not entirely within our control.
We had someone attack us in 2001. Something obviously had to be done, but I think we went about it the wrong way. Meanwhile, every aspect of the real estate industry -- including buyers and sellers -- seemed to lose their heads at the same time, feeding an enormous bubble and ignoring conventional wisdom that warned of a burst. But then it did burst, and the whole house of cards of our economy -- which relies too much on housing starts as a gauge of its health anyway -- came crashing down.
Now it's going to require patience and sacrifice to solve things, and I don't see a lot of willingness, here or in Washington, to employ those qualities.
I'm not sure the old way was ever truly sustainable anyway, at least for the long term. We went through growth for many years in part because women joined the workforce in huge numbers beginning in the 70s, creating two-income families that could afford more big houses, more cars, more big TVs, more stuff. That trend has slowed. Plus we have more and more retirees taking out of the entitlements what young people feed in. And manufacturing was outsourced to China so we could continue to buy cheap merchandise at the Wal-Mart. But good-paying jobs for the middle class vanished as a result. And now we are finding there's a hidden price for cheap goods. Add to that ever-rising higher education, health-care and food costs, and many of us don't seem to have as much money as we did 10 years ago.
Eventually we'll figure out that some degree of cooperation from all sides will serve America better than bitterness and rancor. Maybe we need to look at the way we live and figure out a way to consume less, grow our own food, and live more simply, a little more independently.
