I know the economy is rough, I’m out of work myself, but I’m really getting tired of everything being gloom and doom. I realize bad news sells newspapers, and discussing bad news is a lot more fun than talking about the pluses out there. There is good news out there, retail sales are up, housing sales are up and other economic indicators are turning up. Of course, this is from a pretty low level, but up is good, no matter what. We need to recognize the good things, the biggest issue facing this economy is consumer confidence, and we need to acknowledge and celebrate the good, it’ll help make things better as we move on.
When people talk about the current economic conditions they always compare it to the Great Depression, but when the figures for most indicators come out, they are the worst since the early 80’s, when Reagan took over from Carter. If you ask most people, I don’t think they remember the early 80’s as being that bad. Yes there were problems, but we didn’t talk about the Great Depression during those times.
You have heard several times that the Obama Administration doesn’t want to waste a crisis. I think that there may be truth in that statement, I think that this Administration wants to use this crisis as a permission slip to make a whole raft of changes in how America moves forward. I’m not saying that making these changes is bad or good, as with most things, there will be good and bad coming down the pike. My issue with this approach is that the Administration has a number of balls in the air, and it looks to me, like Congress and the American people don’t have the attention span to give all of these different strategies the attention that they demand. The American people are starting to get confused at all the stuff going on, and I’m afraid that that they will just shut down and pull out of the discussion, and with uncertainty comes closing your wallet and not spending any money.
It seems to me that the Administration needs to focus all its attention on restarting the economy, which needs to be the discussion point every day, on every cable talk show. Be the speaker Democrat or Republican we need to be talking about getting the economy back on its feet. Healthcare is important, as are a number of other issues, but everyone knows that there will be huge battles between the parties over these issues because this is a bedrock belief of both parties. The battle will be long and hard, and the final outcome will be a compromise, the important thing is that the situation is addressed and improved. The way things are today isn’t working; healthcare is becoming a huge expense. We are living longer; we continue to roll up health costs for a longer period of time. As we age we use much more expensive procedures to extend our lives, all of this is costing business and government huge amounts of money. We need to address this, but let’s fix the economy first.
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