What if the stock market fell from 11,000 to 5,000?
What if loose credit evaporated overnight?
What if people who took outrageous mortgages and debt were sent back to a reset point?
What if people had to rent a place to live and save up until they had a reasonable down payment and mortgage payments they could afford?
What if some people lost their highest paying jobs and had to take lower paying, local jobs (or even two) to make ends meet?
What if credit became tight to the point where average households couldn’t have nine credit cards each, couldn’t spend 133% of their annual income every year and actually had to save up money to buy things?
What if they had to save their money for retirement in fixed rate savings accounts and lower interest bonds or treasury bills?
What if CEOs couldn’t make hundreds of millions per year because the market collapsed on them?
What if companies who ship American jobs overseas and offshore their manufacturing operations no longer had a market to sell their goods at “home” because nobody could afford to buy them?
What if this exhausted, heavily-whipped engine of commerce collapsed on its knees on the track?
What if those companies had to begin hiring people back home to make their products
so there would be a market for them again?
What if speculation became impractical because people would only pay what things were actually worth?
What if people couldn’t afford the next biggest flat screen TV and the next thinnest Jesus Phone every season and had to make do with what they had for a few years?
What if manufactured items had to focus on quality instead of disposability because consumers could not afford new versions every year?
What if we had to repair some of our own clothes and household items so they would last longer?
What if some of us had to either grow some of our own food or provide services for people who provided food for us?
What if we all had to sweat out some hard work and hard times and eliminate all of our empty debt and actually live within our means?
What if our government was actually forced to do the same?
What if?
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
A Different Perspective
This is one of the more thought provoking things I've read about the current economic crisis:
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6 comments:
You can take away my Jesus Phone when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.
I'm kidding. I don't have a Jesus Phone.
Rocky, thanks for sharing with us Andy Rooney's thoughts on the matter.
Really, though, if the free market "corrects itself"...back to, oh, 1974, sounds like...would that be a bad thing? (Except for the repair-your-own-clothes part.)
1974? Hell, I’m thinking 1874.
This may sound draconian, but maybe this is what is needed to curb the rampant consumerism that’s defined our sense of well-being, that’s sucked the spirit out of us, that’s led us on an unsustainable path toward ecological disaster. This could be the end of capitalism; this could be our glasnost moment.
It is apparently a slippery slope from Andy Rooney to Edward Abbey.
I say - and I think I speak for the rest of the proletariat (or at least Rex) - bring on the free donuts!
I expect Feral Boy to thrive after the economic meltdown in a Mad Max kind of way. Not so sure about Rex Otto....
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