Oh Yeah I Remember

Silly Me

I guess each year I go through this and after it's over I seem to promptly forget about it again until the next year. Yes people we're talking about the holidays. Thanksgiving is less than a week away, which ushers in the holiday buy me that season and ends the year. Wait! Ends the year? Oh wow, I'm digging myself deeper, while I'm sure some can't wait for the New Year, I keep thinking can't we put off another month. I need more time with this year. I've barely gotten used to writing 2008 on checks, and now I have to start writing 2009?

Maybe it's something buried deep in my subconscious that doesn't want this year to end. I mean normally a year is a year long and by the time it's over it feels like it should be over. This year feels somehow unfinished and maybe it's the economy that is causing those feelings, which is the exact opposite feeling I had back in 2001, when I, and I think most people, just wanted the year over.

I spent a little time looking back over my blogs for the year, lots of political stuffs because this was a big political year for everyone. A lame duck president leaving office, two completely different choices for the future. It was, in retrospect, fun to watch it all unfold, but the aftermath is starting to annoy me just a little bit. I mean when the Democrats lost in 2004 everyone here walked around like they had just seen the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yeah, I was kinda bummed, even though I didn't like Kerry, at the prospect of facing another four years but that lasted about an hour or so.

I hear now the other side whining about the loss, why they lost, how they can win next time...blah blah blah...and yes they should be discussing this but I don't need to know about it. I don't care. Of course blaming Obama for this recession is really reaching, I mean really really reaching. The die for this recession was cast long before he even announced his intention to run for President. People don't have to worry about an increase in their capital gains tax because quite frankly no one this year has a capital gain. In fact they'll be writing off their losses for the next several years (because they can carry over).

What I believe has happened is a massive rationalization that the economy is worse off than people first wanted to believe. People are getting out of the market simply because they don't want to lose any more money. More people are counting their pennies and rightfully so. In a few years we'll hopefully see as a result, the average person carrying a much lower credit card debt and a larger savings account. Of course they'll complain about that too. This problem wasn't caused by deregulation alone, plain and simple old greed played a huge role in our economic demise. Let's make money today and worry about tomorrow....well tomorrow. People were duped by greed, led to believe that if they could get something for nothing. They weren't told they were gambling, they were told not to worry about it. People like to believe what they are told, because it takes the pressure off them. They told me the housing market would continue to rise and they believed them, they said there was NO housing bubble that could burst and even if it did, the money they save would be enough. The fly in that ointment was they didn't pocket the difference into their savings, instead they lived as though they could afford it. They took the family to Hawaii, bought the SUV that looked so nice in the driveway, paid for their daughters wedding and sent their son to a college they couldn't afford, telling him not to bother with financial aid. The very notion of saying no wasn't in their vocabulary. They would charge on their credit cards things they couldn't live without as well as the things they needed, because they earned points. When the bill came they didn't want to spend all their "extra" money on paying it all off, so instead carried a balance and not a small balance of maybe a couple thousand dollars (that they could easily pay off if they wanted to) but a HUGE balance in the fifteen thousand range.

Okay, I'll say it...maybe instead bailing out the lending industry, they should have given each of us a piece of that action and bailed out the American People. Instead of throwing us a bone of a measly thousand bucks, they could have given us a 100K each (tax free of course). Of course I'm not so sure we could have been trusted to spend it wisely either.

© 2008 Whimsical Ranter
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