Off The Cuff

Are Hard Times Coming?

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me?, Business news, politics on Oct 15 2008

Welcome back!

That question is probably on most people’s minds. It is definite that Wall Street thinks so since the Dow once again plunged down in a record slide. A year ago, I was sure that the Dow was going to have to do some correcting downward since points were hitting above 14,000. That was a historic number then. Now the Dow is taking a header. Frankly, I don’t know that much about finances but even I could see that one coming, just not in the way it has done it.

You can sit back and do the armchair thing now just like I am but we did know this could not go on as it was. The housing market was sure to have problems with those kinds of loans to people who were not necessarily able to pay things back. But maybe they were able till all the gas hikes came along. This is not any one problem. There will not be any one solution. If anyone in this country is expecting a quick recovery, they are living in a fantasy land. These problems have been with us for so many years, it will take years to work them out.

So, when thinking about voting, do not make the mistake of taking a candidate you think will iron our all the problems and give the solutions to change the world in a few weeks, months or a couple of years. This is not that easily fixed. At this point, it would take a miracle on God’s level to get things right in this country.

Is our country doomed then? Of course not. It is just that at this point, we will need all the help we can get from THE most savvy people we have. It is possible that we are going to have problems there too though. Our school system has been going from bad to worse long before the “no child left behind” ridiculousness. You know, in theory that should work. In reality, you cannot legislate giving children a good education without giving the funds to help it along. You cannot mandate that every child gets a good education since there are always exceptions to the rule. Handicapped children should not have fallen under that ruling. What we really needed and still do is the type of schools that used to be standard public schools. Know what they call them now? Charter schools and magnet schools. Those schools, for the most part, are teaching what regular public schools used to teach everyone.

Today was a bad day on Wall Street but maybe that isn’t so bad after all. Wall Street has been allowed to do pretty much what they wanted to up to now. The companies that participated in this loan scheme needed the wake up call. The only problem I have at this point is that the CEOs that were letting their companies go down the tubes while they were taking fat cat perks out of the company should be brought up on charges. I think that anyone that was involved in all that should be charged with criminal actions. However, none of that is getting families back the homes they lost due to all this. None of this is saving the families on the brink of losing their homes, cars and whatever else. That needs to be addressed but I do not think that any person going into that office is going to be able to be the grand fixer of things. This took multitudes of years to happen. And lets face it. This is not all on Mr. Bush’s administration. This whole thing has been going back at least as far as the 1970s when OPEC did a try out of a shortage of oil. When we were lining up at the pumps, scared we would run out before we bought any, that was when things should have changed in this country. It did not because no one wanted to do anything about it.

It is not just Mr. Bush’s fault. It is the fault of literally every single President, Vice President and congress since then who did nothing to fix the situation. And no one person going into that office is going to be fixing it all anyway. We had 6 years of Republicans who did nothing in the congress. We have had two years of the Democrats who have done nothing while they had charge of the house and senate. Isn’t it about time we, the people, started cleaning out the bureaucracy and good old boy network thing in Washington. It starts with this November election. Get out there and vote your conscience. No matter who you vote for, remember that they cannot fix everything. It isn’t that simple.

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