Sure, consumer spending drove our economy and helped make America the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
Sure, spending was even easier with our dot-com stock loot, followed by our cash-out equity withdrawal housing bubble loot. And spending was sure a lot easier, and more fun, than that out-dated and boring "saving" thing.
Sure, big Toll Brothers houses, big H2 Hummers, and tons of stuff from Pier 1, the Gap, Home Depot, Nordstroms, Wal-Mart, etc etc etc impressed the neighbors and ourselves.
You must be a successful person, you must have done good in life, if you have a big house and you filled it up with all kinds of stuff. That's success, isn't it?
Well, a bit of (more) bad news. This plastic consumeristic society, this egocentric cheap and hollow "my possessions = me" way of living, might all come crumbling down around us now.
Then who will we be as a society? Who will we be as people? If we lose our possessions, our cherished, expensive, wonderful possessions, and in many cases the big beautiful house that holds them, well, then who are we?
We're about to find out. We made our bed. Now we're about to sleep in it. Before they take it away, that is.
How we changed from savers to spenders
A walk through a suburban neighborhood on trash pickup day reveals an awful lot about American culture. We discard a lot of stuff -- TVs and radios, ironing boards, paintings, computers, doors, cell phones.
Has ours become a throwaway society? Maybe we should be conserving our resources. On the other hand, a big part of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending. Every new cell phone, plasma TV, car or upgraded computer means jobs for somebody ... somewhere.
"In World War II," says Dighe, "it was a patriotic duty to save. During the Great Depression, spending definitely would have been welcomed. ... In World War II the emphasis on savings and thrift was necessary because the entire economy was geared toward the war effort, so we had to shift from consumer goods to war production. Whereas what happened with Sept. 11 -- yes, we have been at war. But it's not quite the same full-scale war as World War II. The war isn't consuming so much of our resources that we can't afford to go out and consume."
May 19, 2006
Spend spend spend spend spend spend spend
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24 comments:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611990/posts
My spending is exceeding my income, I will use credit for gas and food.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611990/posts
Yes but how is gold doing today?
Gotta love The Thinker
Agriculture is booming offshore. Cotton is now produced in Australia and Brazil (replaced rain forests). I have watched the price per pound of cotton drop from 90 cents / pound in 1990 to 30 cents pre pound now. Same cotton grade and type, it is grown right next to my place. The farmers have drastically reduced the number of "trips" over the field from 10+ to 4 by using genetic seed and other techniques. These guys now use tractors that are very powerful now and they can work over 70 feet wide swaths at a time. Their cost to make a pound of cotton are around 25 cents or so, varies with bugs and fuel prices. So the selling price covers their costs to produce the cotton. The number of pound they get per acre are also a factor, the better the weather the more they make. This has been running around 2+ pounds per acre which is pretty good. I have seen it as low as 1-1.25 when the summers are very dry.
The fed "supports" the price of cotton by paying farmers money to make up for the low world price. This is the real paycheck for the farmers. The ag bill is around $15B per year, about the same as another boondoggle - NASA.
The cotton used to go to local textile mills, but those have all closed and now the work is (was?) in Mexico. made in China is all over clothing tags now.
So we have agriculture that is not doing so hot, exporting the cotton and clothing manufacture offshore to manufacturing jobs elsewhere. Those jobs are not coming back.
What about the farms? They have been bought by large farm corporations (bye bye family farm) or sold to real estate developers either by BK farmers of farm children who justr want the money NOW so they can spend spend spend. That is how I bought my 20 acres which was part of a 80 acre plot. I am trying to get the other 60 so I won't have to see cookie cutter houses (and put up with the pissy whiney people who inhabit them) next door. So far the surrounding land is still farming but these guys are getting squeezed. Let the feds wake up and realize the Chicoms and muzzies do not want our dollars (nobody buying our debt), and maybe the feds tighten the belt and spend less. Maybe the sacred cow ag bill gets cut way back. Bye bye farms too.
Will we ever be importing food on a large scale? They are trying to get farmers to sell corn for ethanol, plant switchgrass for fuel. Remember selling wheat to Russia and holding it back as a weapon?
We used to have a big ticket item that was exported - it was the biggest positive on the trade balance sheet. Airliners. Now I fly mostly on Canadian, Brazilian, and European planes. Not so many Boeings. Bail out those airlines that bought these foriegn planes? I hope not. even the next presidential helicopter is Itialian (well, maybe Lockheed gets a few parts and some integration, but the heavy parts are Itialian.
What manufacturing / agriculture jobs?
Anyone for buying guns and ammo as part of a person's well balanced asset holdings?
A woman was on a Fox News program yesterday claiming that she owned a landscaping business and couldn't find any Americans willing to work for her for $35 (or it may have been $37) an hour. Her argument was that illegal Mexican immigrants are vital to our economy, because Americans won't do certain jobs.
I wonder if anybody has checked her claim, or investigated to see if other factors could be scaring off American employees. I bet a lot of teenagers would be thrilled to earn $35 an hour, but maybe I'm wrong. Still, an awful lot of them work for minimum wage at McDonalds.
$35/hr ???
Nurses salary in North Dover, Toms River 08753 starts at $20+/hour !!!!
I guess THEY have to do the DAY LABORERS JOB THEN !!!!
re: Just Zillow the home prices around Toms River if Nurses could afford these home prices !!!!
Can't find workers for $34 per hour. I call BULLSHIT. And you wonder why they call it Faux News.
Obviously she was used to thinking in "pesos".
If it had been a real news station, the journalists interviewing her (i.e. not 'text readers') would have called her on this BS.
Asked, "What advertisements have you placed? Where did you look for people? Can I get your number, we may have viewers who want a job at 35/hr."
Actually, he did grill a little, and looked skeptical, but she was on a roll, and it was a live "interview" that had to be finished for the next commercial.
Today the bond market or cash?
So with anything dollar related hitting the fan the last few days..how much does one think a plasma tv will cost in the next 6 months?
No not in the market for one just curious..i refuse to consume.
i bet in the next year or so there will be a lot of stuff that can be bought cheap. Boats, big TVs, good pool sticks, those stupid looking big wheels (bling), used furniture.
EBAY will be hopping. Come to think of it, maybe that is a good stock pic.
"A woman was on a Fox News program yesterday claiming that she owned a landscaping business and couldn't find any Americans willing to work for her for $35 "
WTF? Perhaps you can't find anybody (American) for hard labor at $8/hr but $35/hr.? Give me a break....total B.S....
seriously isn't $35 an hour like a "G" (grand) a week. I mean in this economy that pretty good money in my book. But then again I was never selfish and happy to just have a good living and my shit is paid for..amen!
The truth behind the LA Times story has been uncovered by Mickey Kaus (kausfiles blog)
http://www.slate.com/id/2141781/
The Fox news story was based on the LA Times story.
Autofx in Phx,
You want my advise? I don't think you should have a significant portion of your portfolio invested in something as volatile as commodities. Perhaps 5% if you are so inclined. But I would certainly not short gold, or anything for that matter.
I'm no day-trader, I'm a buy & hold, dollar-cost-averaging, completely diversified investor. It's not exciting, there wont be any big windfalls but in the end I will come out well ahead of the pack.
I have no particular interest in buying or shorting gold. I would like to buy a house, but I have decided that it would be best to wait for the market to shake out all those greedy investors. I think that at this time there is little up-side potential in real-estate and there is a very real possibility of disaster, so its just not worth it.
Now, can we stop all this chit chat about housing and get back to the REAL issues of this blog, like what to do about all the Mexicans?
Here's the real link.
http://tinyurl.com/kxzvy
So, this woman is an activist trying to sell open borders, and not the objective businesswoman she's been claiming in cross-country campaign. Hum. Wonder why that isn't surprising, or that the Press left that part out.
Thanks for alerting us.
I'm referring to the woman claiming she can't hire Americans for $34 an hour.
Here again is the link:
http://tinyurl.com/kxzvy
35 x 40 x52 = 72,800
It might be true but its probly just seasonal work.
Heard an interesting comment last week -- there are few real liberals or conservatives in Congress anymore, most are globalists. This includes our current President and most of his cabinet.
Globalists don't give a rat's ass about the fallout from the giant shifts we're seeing in the U.S. and Chinese economies. They welcome these changes as the price we have to pay for their enlightened vision.
Fed chairman Bernanke is a globalist who ecourages coordinated efforts by central banks around the world to "manage" debt and currency values. Notice how these bankers have beaten down the price of gold and ratcheted up the U.S. dollar over the past week.
We aren't in Kansas anymore.
A globalist is pretty easy to spot.
They are usually wealthy elite who have more interests in common with a Chinese tycoon than their own domestic population.
They have exactly the same interests as the Chinese tycoon: screw the Chinese workers (no unions, no rights, no envionmental standards) and screw the Western workers (no wages, no productivity).
They are globalists, in that if the US or wherever goes down the tubes, they'll pack up and move to Singapore or Dubai or wherever the global elite have set up their posh enclaves.
Liberals care about universal justice and progress.
Conservatives care about national power and benefiting citizens like them.
Globalists care about themselves and maintaining the system that keeps them there, and making sure the blame gets put on abstract "global economic forces" akin to weather rather than specific, destructive policy choices which is the truth.
On identifying the problem: Marx was right, though Communism is crap.
"Globalists care about themselves and maintaining the system that keeps them there, and making sure the blame gets put on abstract "global economic forces" akin to weather rather than specific, destructive policy choices which is the truth."
That defines 99% of Congress, doesn't it?
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