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Post by spudbuddy on May 15, 2012 5:01:20 GMT -6
Imagine for a moment that all this higher education was free. Paid for by a fully government-sponsored tax based securitized public-funded allotment , and as such, answerable directly to taxpayers. What would be the result? Congress would be screaming blue murder at all this wasted money (on behalf of taxpayers) on education that produced no return. How foolish is it for a nation to churn out burger flippers and shelf stockers at 25 to 50 thousand a pop? (Congress resembling a chorus of scorched cats) If we top up the tank with 3 and a half million new grads annually, let's see...(doing the math) in three years' time we wind up with upwards of 7 million grads whose education will have next to nothing to do with the employment they finally find. But anyhow, they assumed all that debt for the sheer glory of reading, writing and arithmatic? (Congress becomes apopleptic - if the debt belongs to them.) The hammer hits the gavel. The big lie is uncovered. Education is not required for employable debt-free existence. Not at all. The catch of course, is that earnings are probably rather low...certainly nowhere near what's needed to pursue the American dream... The blackest joke of all...............all that education - every little bit of it - is far too dumb to actually know how to create jobs and employ itself. Isn't that rich? (I'll retire to bedlam.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 27, 2012 4:55:05 GMT -6
Initially, the plan started out that declining wages should have relative purchasing power by supplying demand with ever-cheapening discounted junk. This still goes on, but is aided and abetted by ever-increasing leveraged debt ( though the retraction of available credit is part and parcel of the current economic meltdown) and as such, betrays the diminishing purchasing power of western currency. When I was still a teenager, the monthly wages of $260/mth had more relative purchasing power then - than 15 times that amount does now. Credit hardly existed at all - for any but the upper classes. My city had relatively few truly homeless people, because the downtown core was peppered with 50-cent/night flophouses. These were miserable places to be sure, but still offered a roof, warmth, running water and hydro (and the landlords still made profit.) Profit margins too.....the 50% markup of that time is now replaced by margins ten or twenty times that amount. Economies of scale live or die on sales that rise off the charts, whereby corporate retail both bullies the suppliers whose workers make the stuff, and their workers who sell it. The short-waged worker historically - has been offered back the difference between his real wage and a living wage - by credit, lent as profit- earning interest. What a marvelous shell game! Should fully one-third of Chinese workers ever attain the equivalent of a sustainably consuming middle class (a powerful corporate wet dream, to be sure) that still leaves two-thirds of all workers out in the cold, on the outside looking in. They have already had their revolution (still quite alive in the memory of many) and are quite capable of having another. The sheer amount of worker rebellions annually in China is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the politburo...any news leaking in on how their expats are actually living in the west - just stirs the pot. But they labor under the same delusions: that the untold wealth of the relative few in Hong Kong, and in the sprawling landscapes of North American styled McMansioned subdivisions - is the carrot that all should strive for. They don't belive, nor do they want to believe - that there simply isn't enough to go around, nor will there ever be. If Chinese car ownership per capita ever approached North American levels, we would need another planet to provide the fossil fuel resources to supply such a fleet. Ain't gonna happen. This is the sick puppy that barfs its breakfast all over the global carpet. Not a pretty sight. Although they smoke an awful lot, this is hardly what is responsible for the sheer amount of respiratory-related disease that is decimating the population....that belongs to the air quality fouled by rising industrial concentration and the burning of the dirtiest of fossil fuels for the energy so desperately needed to keep it all going.
The solutions to all these messes were always readily available - by utilizing democratic processes through public will, and societies most capable of this are by far the healthiest. The opposite holds true - the more successful the dismantling of such instruments - the greater the inequality of sharing in resources.
Sadly, too...........two full-time $20/hr jobs in many North American cities, would hardly budge a family into a middle class existence now (without seriously leveraged debt) - which is why the sprawl grows ever outward and away from the core.
And finally - how can a nation retain its identity without the artifacts of domestically designed, innovated and self-produced products? Answer: it can't. This identity is not reproduced artificially by cheap delusional culturally distorted stand-ins. Just as an Asian worker on the other side of the world can never really replace the concept of my size....(mistakenly thinking that a north american middle-aged male has to have a waist size wider than the leg length is long) so too....in just about everything. Nothing really fits the way it should. And so we have given over post-modern design to an ever-cheapened knockoff, that has the peculiar quality of completely lacking in pride of craft. (Supposedly, the world cannot afford this anymore, unless very wealthy.) And back we come full circle, where the climb up the ladder to the top, dances to the death with the race to the bottom.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 23:29:40 GMT -6
I wonder a lot about those investors. Are they snapping up houses instead of high art and racehorses? Do they figure that owning a bunch of them will result in killer revenue when millions more can't affor to own, just to rent? Imagine....big retail operating on the basis that no-one gets to use a credit card anymore. All cash. What happens? Three quarters of their sales disappear - but the folks with ready cash make out like bandits, because the price of everything tumbles to lure that cash in to the store. They're still spending the cash they would have spent anyway, because they've got it - but the mileage they get out of their cash goes a lot further. Now what I really wonder...is how much the actual source of all that investment cash - comes from the same damned sources as what caused the meltdown in the first place! (I mean....all that bailout money had to wind up in certain pockets, um?)
And Jeffolie.....your daughter's condo deal would be nothing but an idle pipe-dream in my little town, unfortunately...................
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 23:13:59 GMT -6
Could be because they were the generation that slipped in between the two world wars - though some of the earliest of them would have shown up for the Korean War - and the later ones of course would have been invited to the big party in Viet Nam. But if you consider how they were actually socialized and acculturated...the early bunch weathered the full brunt of the Great Depression as kids - while the later bunch were growing toward coming of age through the '50's (McCarthy kids.) Economically, it was a fat time...politically, pretty mean....though the micro-era of 1947-1952 produced some pretty astounding stuff. (Before it was all shut down again.) But again, if history is defined by participation in war, much of this generation was excluded, or opted out, one way or another.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 23:03:45 GMT -6
To me, the critical part is producing wealth, in the traditional sense. I take this to mean that the "financialization" of the American economy has been good for a tiny elite, and horrific for the majority. I get the picture that American owned and controlled interests play global Monopoly across the planet - to the detriment of the American worker, and devoid of any social contract with the American people. (This of course is what was yelled about even back in the days of Jack London, while he was busy writing The Iron Heel.) For most - it is no longer possible to achieve middle class status or comfort in life without higher education...blue collar is fast becoming extinct. But the hyperdelusional idea that white collar "soft" jobs would replace this? Is a bit of a joke. Nothing replaced it, except for permatemp employment, term postions eternally without the benefits that middle class families always depended on, and will always need to depend on. To decry common sense, and proclaim that the populace can all become glorious entrepreneurs....self-styled and self-employed opportunists - is another joke. The only thing "free" about free trade - has been the freedom of vested interests to make out like bandits, and make off with the lifeblood of a once-strong economy that took a century to build...looting like a riotous mob of huns. (in suits.) What kind of public will can create the political will to change all this? Eventually, it all has to tilt, right off the table. What grabs me about that is the sheer length of the fall it would take...if the majority of a nation living so far beyond their means trying to prop up an illusion that a certain quality of life is sustainable....eventually the sheer amount of debt required to pay for it all (rather than actual living wages) would cause such a massive retraction that it could take a generation to recover. And yet - I don't think America is alone in this, at all. All over the world, nations are whistling past the graveyard, trying to keep a lid on things. (Some appear to be doing a better job of this....but except for maybe a couple of Scandinavian countries maybe - we're all in the same old boat.) And yeah...I get the feeling that big old 800 pound gorilla is about to leave a big dump right there on the carpet, and then wreck the house............
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 9:15:47 GMT -6
While one borrows money in order to get an education - they are out of the job market. This borrowed money is also actually, their income (while in the process of wrestling with academia.) So they are not actually unemployed, in the traditional sense. I know people well into their fifties - retraining for divers different new skills and abilities - who will never realize any gain that would actually enable them to pay off the cost of that retraining. Again - they're out of the job market. I know young people who earn multiple degrees, graduate degrees - cascading layers of credentialed supposed employability - who are basically "hiding" from the job market. School is an eternal womb, from which they never have to be born into the new reality. (Until they finally finish, and it comes time to pay the piper.)
I like the quote about "buying the house, without getting the house"...........the favorite theme of free enterprise these days: money for nothing.
We are educating ourselves to death. The more "educated" we become as a society, the worse it gets. (Could there be a corelation here?) I'm still shocked at the levels of well-spoken and well-read intellect I come across in service industry these days. Some of those I talk to have been thus employed for years. Ironically - for some of them - the total educational debt that they struggle with, would be just about the amount of money they would be ahead of the game, had they not bothered with higher education at all.
As far as levels of failed dropouts who don't graduate? They comprise the layers of humanity who don't belong in the halls of upper academia. When I was of college age, they were nowhere to be found within those hallowed halls. They were already out there working - blue collar, white collar - productive citizens in a healthy economy. Now they too -are shoved into the Vegas crapshoot freewheeling casino high-risk "no child left behind" no dirt under the fingernails working fantasy. Growing donkey's ears on Pleasure Island. Hey. I love education. I'm all for it. But this version of education - is so stupid, I'm not sure anymore how it lives. I am pretty sure though, that the life-support needs to be unplugged. The patient is in a deep coma, and not likely to wake up anytime soon.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 8:45:31 GMT -6
Although there is a powerful element of blaming the victim on this - much of it comes from 2 generations who never had to face these kinds of educational costs, or the jobmarket as it now is. Suppose every high school senior was compelled to take a required course in survival of higher ed. Imagine that this included critical examination of best-risk job targets according to real and existing skills and attributes. Included would be tight budget and money management, and complete refusal to take on perceived future unmanageable debt. The results? The entire higher education industry as we now know it - would tank, in short order. What has happened in the last two decades is a gross inflation of the value of a diploma. It is not worth what it costs, period. Yet, unlike what happened with real estate - it just keeps chugging along. Imagine being able to borrow 60 grand with absolutely no collateral? That's what they've come up with. So much smoke and mirrors. The "value" of this education (supposedly) could have been gained for free in the public library.
But I'm not surprised that a lot of folks are getting awful nervous. The debacle to come...of over a trillion bucks worth of compounding interested debt sloshing around out there through the economy over the next few decades - and it keeps growing......all that money, and all the money that it earns....going to one place. (sort of like how rising energy costs have sucked up so much of the slim profit margins of so many small businesses.) Add to this the cost in human suffering and despair - this yoke of indentured servitude on the backs of the unemployed, underemployed, disabled - all of it unforgiveable, undischargeable...
Even Genghis Khan was smart enough to know how not to push people too far.
But you know what gets me the most? Looking at Sallie Mae's spreadsheets - it struck me that this massive debtload earns dividends for investors. Who are they? One thing they are not. Young people coming up through the system, about to start their adult lives. Nope. They're a bunch of old folks. Old - as only old can be in the eyes of youth. How long before the worm turns?
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 8:08:17 GMT -6
Rightly so. The sad part is that the taxpayer is held hostage, funding the results of Big Corp's naughty behavior - throwing all the best toys out of the playpen.
It's an interesting take though.....re-identifying the crazy quotient: that what the North American worker has gone through since the big meltdown started over four years ago...literally is driving people nuts. I can well imagine Big Gov't deciding to change the rules in order to calm the populace...after all, this affects an awful lot of people. But it's a sad commentary on our times - instead of utilizing all those skills that just decay and atrophy beyond repair - send them out to pasture and lock the barn door.
What did they think the ultimate result of all this outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing and deindustrialization was going to be? That we'd all wind up making $40/hr emailing each other from the comfort of our home offices...while sipping lattes and luxuriating in perfectly futuristic lifestyle moments? They somehow didn't know....that this Disney fantasy isn't how things work in the real world?
Yes, the politics is to sweep the mess on the floor under the rug. Enough of a lump to tilt the piano. Conversation heard at a rent party: Q."What do you do for a living?" A. "Act crazy."
But yeah, pimping out the public purse doesn't cut it, when compared to job creation. A nation that intercepts wealth while unable to afford to employ itself - now that's what's nuts.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 26, 2012 7:42:31 GMT -6
Ah, Big Pharma - Their lobbying power in Washington must approach perfection. Some other related crimes against humanity: While the civilized world wages war on drugs that cannot be properly taxed or corporatized - Big Pharma wages war with drugs on the young and innocent: (all for fun and profit) First there was the Ritalin kids... Now there's a whole string of psychotropics being pushed. Check out the rising percentage of primary schoolage children doped on the stuff. Have a good look at the tilted ratio of boy/girl users. It's a cute trick any performing illusionist would be proud of. While what gets all the press is rising anger against post-feminist teaching methods supposedly aimed at male students for non-compliance, the corporate bandits make off with the loot. The Child Protective Industry is in on it too. The rising percentages of so called "saved" kids (from the universally convenient crime of neglect due to "poverty") - vague and shabby in its methodology.....that are subdued into submission with psychotropics - should be cause for investigation. The percentage of kids in foster care doped out of their minds is a good indicator of how conveniently captive the market is.
As if all this isn't bad enough - the hot new trend with high school seniors and college students is the brisk trade of psycotropics used as "study aids." In my time - the target used to be the big chill. Partake in a little something that brought on laughter, enlightenment, and the profound enjoyment of poking fun at fools and charlatans in suits. Now it's all about achieving the goal of the 4.0 GPA - all to the end result of 6-figure debt and a jobless future.
The irony of all this would be laughable, if it wasn't such a sick puppy.
I'm not sure of the actual numbers, but aren't at least half of the top dozen or so highest performing American corporations pharmaceuticals? It appears that Aldous Huxley's "soma" has arrived.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 25, 2012 22:35:11 GMT -6
I suspect a lot of those homes were intended to be retirement packages. But asking the question, who will buy? - I shouldn't wonder that it won't be a legion of the coming generation that will not be in shape to take on that kind of liability. Their debtload plus lack of job stability won't allow it, even if they were foolish enough to want to make the attempt. So this part of the economy just sort of constipates...with no laxitive looming on the horizon. One wonders, though, if it may not become a feeding frenzy for investors, at some point. it conjures up the scenario of a vast new renter class, unable to make the jump into ownership. And so goes the dream, into that good night.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 24, 2012 8:04:44 GMT -6
I think this brings it right back to the critical issue of the job market itself. In a truly healthy economy ("old-school" style) there were plenty of jobs for people with degrees. The hollowing out of huge sectors (middle management, for example) that were a source of employment for people with degrees of all sorts - has created the mad scramble for what's left. Although never a conventionally popular idea for those who are simply pro-education without thinking it through to return on investment, I'm left with the impression that the end result - the furious competition by increasing numbers of grads for ever-decreasing job prospects, plays right into the hands of bottom-line business (on a much grander scale than simply the good old union-busting model.)
I think this is exactly what higher education has become. A furious competition on a rapidly tilting table. In whose best interest is it, that students now have to become the perfectly astute wise old sages in matters of higher education, life planning, brilliant choices and all the rest - instead of basically what they are, and what they have always been. If what I've just described are the upper half - that means the lower half represents far too many people to just simply dismiss as fools. That's an awful lot of fools who will end up depending on a social safety net, or at best, spend the majority of their adult lives unable to adequately contribute on the plus side of the ledger.
And I do agree. There are plenty of skills out there going begging for application. Is it a lack of skills, really - or just that our standard of living is too expensive (by global standards.) Any way you add it up, it is an incredibly wasteful supply side to an economy, to have an unskilled job filled by someone who went into considerable debt in order to (supposedly) gain that same job. For the job.......will never pay back the educational debt not needed for it in the first place.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 20, 2012 17:01:25 GMT -6
Yes - I think this is what has created the sort of "Casino Royale" approach to higher education in the last decade or two. Which course of study? Which institution? How much bait and switch? The ideal of the critical process designed to create a reasonably intelligent adult - has been replaced by a lottorama. many winners still - for the time being, but an ever-growing percentage of losers. If this growing percentage includes all those who will see the age of 40 before they ever can dream of participating in any real way socioeconomically......how can this be good for a society? It just paves the way for a narrowing elitism, on a scale not seen since the Great Depression - and even then, there were resources waiting in the wings that no longer exist.
I heard a university professor on a panel remark once, recently, to the effect... "Many graduates out there have jobs now that do not require a university education. Then why make this a prerequisite? The jobs themselves, though not requiring post secondary learning, do not set the ground rules. The employer does. If the employer dictates that you must have a degree to qualify for the job, then you in fact, must have the degree. This is to say, the job requires no special set of skills or expert knowledge that could not be acquired in high school."
I had to restrain myself for jumping up and applauding that prof. And concluded on the spot....a higher education, especially a very expensive one - not needed for a future longterm job? - Has become a sort of pre-dispostioned "Job Qualification Tax" - to be paid up front....no guarantees.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 20, 2012 16:42:30 GMT -6
Found this interesting little tidbit. www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/has-the-great-recession-made-us-forever-poorer/254629/The accompanying chart is most illuminating. Mentions something in the caption underneath about policymakers being terrifed. I don't doubt it. A quick glance reveals two things: - the average duration of the time of unemployment has doubled, within the past 3 years. - from 1950 to 2010, there had only been one time that this average duration had crested 20 weeks - and that was the recession of '82-'83 Of course, what longterm unemployment does, often enough, is just blow people right out of the water. They are gone, as per healthy consumption to prop up a domestic economy. That's the part that shows up on the economist's radar. As dismal as this prognosis can be...What shows up on the radar of the sociologist is the true measure of the length and breadth of the deadliness of the disease.
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Post by spudbuddy on Mar 17, 2012 14:11:30 GMT -6
[/color] [/quote]
And there it is. I don't know whether to call it the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the youth of the nation, or the most massive misallocation of educational funding imaginable. Especially in a lousy economy, I can't help but come to the conclusion that what the investors who profit from this nonsense actually figured out to do..............is to create a sort of "faux upgraded" high school diploma, allegedly necessary for employment. In the healthy economy of my youth, a real high school diploma offered far better job prospects than many post-graduate degrees will ever offer, now. This is ridiculous. One wonders how long the shell game will continue to play on, before the jig is up.
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Post by spudbuddy on Feb 28, 2012 18:27:48 GMT -6
In a petroleum based economy, messing with the base skews everything (as stated.) But how much of the current political and economic jousting of petro money markets is also skewed by the looming reality of Peak Oil? (which we've probably passed the point of no return - however many years ago.) If growth in energy supply remains necessary for overall economic growth - then the marriage of those two seems to suggest trouble in paradise, and impending divorce, somewhere down the line. What tweaks my imagination is this business of falling demand (1997 levels.) The less miles driven bit - strongly suggests that yes - a downward slope of economic activity is apparent. If the nature and habits of what we put in our gas tanks can be used as an indicator - primer, so to speak, than what can we derive from this for the future, considering that it is after all, not even the majority of petroleum we use for all purposes? (heating, mfr, energy, etc.)
I think it's really critical to look at this from the standpoint of resource depletion. The more this becomes a factor, the less lattitude we have to address it.
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Post by spudbuddy on Feb 28, 2012 17:48:25 GMT -6
Yep, and return on investment has to be factored in. Ever notice how incredibly well-educated our bartenders, cab drivers, shelf stockers, and various other service providers are becoming? I almost upchucked at the idea that student debt is considered "consumer spending" by the fools on the Hill. Spent by young people, many of whom will spend a goodly portion of their real - adult lives, before they're ever able to spend on much of anything else (while trying to pay back those loans.)
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 28, 2012 19:33:08 GMT -6
Well now, as a Canadian, I'm glad to know we carry a few good decent brownie points!!! But interestingly (after reading through the rest of that list) the real reasons tarrifs are NOT applied - is where the real story is. This whole thread reminds me of a lazy wolf who would rather lay down in the middle of a lemming march, (tasty small bites) instead of getting off his butt and chasing down that moose. But the whole punitive mentality of squeezing blood from a rock....instead of the jugular spout from productive job creation - fits the picture I see. I know a single mom who makes $12/hr and has to pay a court-ordered psyche evaluator the equivalent of $60/hr just to qualify for 1-hr. "visitation" with her court-kidnapped kids (at $120 a pop).............and this mentality cuts right through GDP "measurement." So I dunno.....from grass roots on up - it's a farce. Reminds me - a favorite uncle used to come and visit when I was a kid - would run out the back door and scatter the contents of his jingle-coin pocket into the backyard grass. Us kids would spend all afternoon chasing pennies.......and never think about that fat chubby wallet nestled in his hip pocket.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 28, 2012 19:11:41 GMT -6
Yep - I've noticed Obama re-discovering his pre-post-industrial muse just in time to sow the seeds of hope amongst the hopeless....not surprised. And I wonder - sustainable productivity....after taking the hit it took back when consumers siphoned off whatever equity their home piggie banks coughed up to shop their way to a domino propped-up economy (only to have all that debt wander over the cliff along with foreclosed adventurists) and then come back for a quick encore as "saved" mortgage payments not paid. It's been a crazy run.....trying to keep the retail cash registers ringing. (Ask not for whom the bell tolls?) But if we've been in a three and a half decade swoon of forgetfulness, that it was wages that used to buy what we bought - how red-faced do we need to feel over our own collective folly? That's an awful lot of graveyards whistled past. Sooner or later the zombies step out of the screen and into the backyard, I think. And yeah - when finance became romance, the vast majority were never invited to that ball, nor ever would be. As long as the bridesmaids would line up in Walmart, (cheap glass slipper knockoffs) we could stagger along up to midnight. That's a sad looking pumpkin, though.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 28, 2012 18:52:03 GMT -6
I've gone through 3 used vehicles in the past 6 years (avg. useage at two years each) and the average cost of keeping them (reliably on the road) hasn't even totalled what a new car payment would be monthly (minus insurance, upkeep, fuel, parking...etc.) There's just something so much more warm and fuzzy feeling - not having to make that car payment every month. Incidentally - on the Peak Oil forum - I've read so many commenters - saying their current car is probably their last. Whether that's true or not, it certainly represents the sentiment - to not pay a new sticker price ever again. Funny twist though.........the used car stock comes from what were initially purchased as brand new....that stock dropping, drops the pool of used. I remember when gas spiked in 2008, there were tons of cheap deals for SUV guzzlers - and nobody was bitin'. (my current drive is the second smallest SUV - 4-cylinder Tracker that sips gas like a cheap date.) But it makes sense - in a lousy, unpredictable (except eternal bad news) economy, and high anxiety over job security - who wants to have a large monthly car payment hanging over their head? That's the beauty of buying used. The cash is spent up front (and with a good used vendor....reliable, and trustworthy - it works.) I keep myself reliably mobile in vehicles totally devoid of the panache of shiny new.....but that cost an average of about $2 grand each. Most new dealers won't even look at that as a down payment. I think...gone are the days when the populace can indulge their vanity with turning over two year-old models for the latest treats and toys.....mobility versus lousy public transit is just too critical for too many people. All said and done - it isn't new that serves as a tonic for the economy....as stated above - it's servicing all the used stuff and keeping it on the road. Makes sense that this is where the growth (if any) is. This mentality shift could perhaps serve as an indicator, right across the board. There are an infinite number of ways we could buy smarter, cheaper (in the long run) and more economical. That doesn't necessarily prop up an economy (in fact, I'm sure it doesn't.) Which is sad...........smarter consumers = bad "business" depending on how you qualify business health. But if I could buy local and domestic for 25% more (depending on the overall size of price) and know that what I bought would last me 5 times longer than el cheapo - I'd do it in a heartbeat. To me, that's win-win for the supplier, and the consumer.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 1, 2012 16:42:49 GMT -6
There are still more workers looking for work than there are open job positions. It has also become an economy where the typical college graduate is not getting a larger return on investment even though they are sinking more and more into debt because of rising tuition costs: Source: BusinessWeek “A college education is becoming more expensive while the return on investment is falling. A similar trend hit in the housing market. Yet the gap in just one generation has catapulted into a tragic scenario. In 1984 households headed by those 65 and older held a 10 time median net worth advantage on households headed by those 35 and younger. That figure is now up to a stunning 47 today. A gap is always expected as those who are older have time to save and accumulate but the size of the gap is troubling.” How does the above impact the median household income? First it makes it much more difficult for younger households to begin building wealth with a large amount of debt hanging over their head. It also causes a system where income disequilibrium has been growing over time: The above basically highlights the shrinking middle class in America. The above figures do not account for the recession but the trend is unmistakable. Since 1989 most of the large gains in household wealth have occurred at the top 10 percent of households. Yet if we break down actual wealth, that is saved money in equity, stocks, housing, and other assets the discrepancy becomes even more pronounced: The top 10 percent of U.S. households control over 70 percent of all financial wealth. The median household income is treading water with the rising cost of food, energy, healthcare, and education going up faster than their income. It is good news that the median household income figures for the US are becoming more widely known. What we do with this information will be a question for the upcoming years. www.mybudget360.com/what-is-the-median-household-income-in-the-us/#more-3597So much to comment on - on your entire post, but I'd like to focus on this part. College debt is now nicely hitting its target - a trillion, and now tops out at more than combined credit card debt, a remarkable achievement. This debt is financed and forthrighted by investment vehicles, and as such, provides profit opportunity for those same investors (the majority of whom make up the generation that begat those same debtors.) Interesting, isn't it? A nation of oldsters feeding off its young? I'm an oldster myself, but not at all immune to the irony of this. "Return on investment" is entirely the point of such massive irrational risk - whereby a generation and a half bought into the fairytale that higher education was a ticket to an easy middle class existence (or higher.) For some, this is still true - for an ever-growing cohort, it is not true at all. My son, who is 28, and a grad, and who performs work that his degree was not at all necesary for - spins tales and tales of a whole generation of young adults whose personal philisophies represent what I would have called (at that same age) the straight and narrow adherence to a hallowed path of conventional conservatism - but who, in their lifestyles and financial aspirations, represent the most astounding similarity to all the doped up tuned out turned off socially misfit dropped off hippies, yippies, yuppies and otherwise incompetent and misguided yahoos known to me in my mispent youth. (After which, we all of us, most of us - got down to business, and straightened out.) Only, there is no straightening out, now. It requires an actual functioning economy to provide that little opportunity. I wonder - are we busy growing a lost generation of F. Scott McGeraldists? - a socially combustible collection of cats on hot tin roofs? eternal child-adults, incompatible with the new world order (that creates no order at all, in their lives.) In short: what I was ready to settle down and tackle at the age of thirty, easily....will be next to impossible for many even well into their forties, or even fifties... Talk about mortgaging a youth, um? But still, this contrasts nicely with so many financial philosophies of the current era. Back in my time, "sha la la la la la, live for today" was just a silly lyric in a silly pop song - now it has become the holy mantra for the most conventional and conservative of us all. As Scrooge remarked to Bob Cratchit on one of those Christmas Eves past..... "I'll retire to Bedlam."
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 1, 2012 15:16:53 GMT -6
I recall reading an article in the local news about a giant bedroom community on the edge of my greater urban area....full of endlessly sprawled McMansioned subdivisions. An investigating reporter stumbled into this issue while responding to a complaint by the local schoolboard. Apparently, their enrolment in local schools had skyrocketed, and they were having a difficult time keeping up with the demands - as if a mini-baby boom had suddenly struck the community. While driving through the subdivisions, it struck this reporter that what appeared at first as incredibly oppulent households....six-car driveways full of 8 SUV's per house....just didn't make sense. A little bit of digging around provided the answer. These McMansions were full of people who came from places in the world where extended family living is still the norm. Consequently, a core couple with 2 or three children had teamed up with various in-laws, adult siblings, cousins, etc. Add it all up -and this could extend to perhaps as many as 5 or 6 adults plus that same number of children, per household. Divying up the $5000/mth mortgage then became mere child's play. Smart economics. What really intrigued me about this, more than anything else though, was the productive use of the 3 or 4 thousand square feet of space. Instead of three or four rooms per family member, it had come back down to what I remember growing up -exactly one room per. Gigantism reduced back down to a minimalist motif. Not only that - but more people to share resources, childcare, and just running a communally run home - less stress and pressure on any individual within the home. The trick - is to accept this as a natural way of living, and domestic set-up. I'm sure it has its downfalls - but hard to argue with the obvious benefits.
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Post by spudbuddy on Jan 1, 2012 15:00:14 GMT -6
I think it's a very telling factor - that the 20% down responsible buyers got hit by all the flying debris, as well as everybody else. But really - there never was liquidity to pay for all that overpriced real estate, in the first place... When the pipe dream of eternally rising values was looked upon as the answer to that little problem - it became the problem itself. It's a sad indictment: that something as integrally necessary as decent housing morphs into just one more exotically enhanced financial instrument providing profit for investors, sooner or later they muck that one up, too. And equally sad but far more scary - traditionally, an average middle class family's entire asset package was always wrapped up in their home....far more important these days, because the pension fund has gone the way of the dodo.
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Post by spudbuddy on Dec 3, 2011 11:38:10 GMT -6
Could debtor's prison be the end-product of processed finely-chiseled consumers? cash-cowed larcenously-lashed dollar brand eyes bat abandoned, no doubt - at the mere notion of our next big thing. No point in making stuff for folks to buy when they haven't the money - grab them all on the way downwards into bankruptcy and process them that way - for fun and profit. Scrooge becomes reincarnated and reinvented as a true Free Enterpriser......though he winds up with a saved soul, so to speak - his fondest fans forget that his happy reborn rich self was funded on the backs of abused debtors. oops - God debt us, every one!
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Post by spudbuddy on Dec 3, 2011 11:26:06 GMT -6
I wonder what it takes to chew that carrot off the end of the stick - the one that Jiminy Cricket's wishing star still has the bottom three quarters of the population believing the cure for their troubles is a yellow brick road. Trouble is, the emphasis is on "their" and not society's. Which means that important little bit of information needed - becomes obscured to the point of meaninglessness - only it actually means a lot: there ain't enough to go around. Imagine - 150 million American millionaires. (only when inflation raises the cost of a twinkie to a thousand bucks, and that becomes loose pocket change.) The re-invention of class should raise interesting confrontations between the privileged and the rest of us. Isn't it interesting how rich folks have no use for government? But poor folks sure do. Seems to me how this sort of states maybe the obvious? - rich folks don't need government - because they ah, actually "govern", so to speak.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 24, 2011 8:23:58 GMT -6
Isn't the canary in the coalmine the fact that even grunt jobs, low-wage garbage - now turns up its nose at millions of applicants (inventing new exotic ways and means to screen them out) as well as the fact that many are now scrambling for "multiple" jobs....that are supposed to all add up to something that will allow a worker to actually live a life? To my way of thinking - someone who has 20 tentative hours a week, looking for 40....is still Half-unemployed.
Strange too...that the employee's market we used to have (in spite of the fact that it actually provided for a healthier economy)..........apparently gave BIGBIZ the measles - so it got scrapped.....the innoculation provided by cheap labor elsewhere. But our economy never was the doings of that collection of perverts.....it was the entire collection of domestic workers - the whole jigsaw puzzle of them. When workers aren't wanted, what does a society stand for? When they aren't wanted earning enough to not have to consume high-interest debt, who's really running the show? Stunning democratic stagger to the sidelines, I'd say.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 24, 2011 8:07:06 GMT -6
I work in a very large university and I see the trend: Enrollment increases every year (so far) but the increase in campus construction / renovation is staggering - Of course, the costing refects whatever the market will bear.
I wonder why it is, though....that we are so unable, as a society, to tackle such a simple concept:
"If we educate and over-educate ourselves to death for jobs that just don't exist, then exactly what is the point of the education itself, and the cost of it? Is this not ridiculously wasteful?"
- and if the answer to that question takes us to a pretty obvious conclusion, then does it not become apparent that this whole mess serves someone other than the student/consumer? I would think so.............
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 24, 2011 7:53:46 GMT -6
Those 33 items add up to just the bare bones of the beginnings of a perfect storm. - I wonder if, just when the housing market staggers to its feet again, we're looking at a $5-$10 gallon of gas (and lord knows what kind of heating and cooling costs for lawyer foyers...) - all those '70's middle class kids, whose kids now haven't got a prayer to match their parents' class status. -all those recent grads who will be paying student loans for a lifetime....$1000/mth + payments for the next 20-30 (working?)years....consuming one and one thing only in this economy: (non-performing education-employment opportunities. - the slow and steady death of even the idea of a living wage job for anyone except the elite at the top -the much more rapid erosion of any belief that it is wise to take on any risk for the future...(marriages, families, children, new model cars, homes, education....) -the whole idea itself that a real job is a lottery win (instead of the byproduct of a healthy social economy) -the dispensation and dispersal of the American male....tossed to the sidelines (to perhaps return one day as a house-husband / chattal / nursemaid / drone / national embarrassment??? (such a strange creation of corporate alchemy)
It goes on and on, like a two-penny soap opera - only no-one's watching anymore.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 19, 2011 2:06:28 GMT -6
Absolutely. I get this real weird picture of a tiny toddler with gooey fingers showing an economist just how a square peg won't go into a round hole.............. (That eureka moment) - when all the education in the world provides us with endless educated bum possibilities.... only the trains don't carry boxcars no mo' - and we will not be having culturally acute social aspirations anytime soon - educated waste - sort of like domestic-born landfill... only this "garbage" is human dreams...(imagine the uppity-ness!) to actually believe in the conventional formula...diplomas = secure family income?
Shall we soon require a PHD to write out a parking ticket? harrass a defaulted student debtor? babysit or walk a dog?
There must be absolutely millions and millions of employed and semi-employed people out there who just don't want to think about, much less admit to - the fact that what they do for a living they were educated enough for by the end of grade 8.
wasted education wastes people.
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 19, 2011 1:51:20 GMT -6
and as de woild toins, de dummies dat toin de woild.................. shrug as we find out that it takes real jobs and um, income, actually - to churn retail into butter. Imagine........... gee honey, maybee there's somewhere cheaper still, to shop... (weird thing is, we still call it "shopping.")
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Post by spudbuddy on Sept 19, 2011 1:34:59 GMT -6
The commentary was interesting regarding China. And a lot of inferences can be drawn from it. It still appears that productive investment capital is still flooding into China. But for storage-of-wealth purposes, capital is flowing out--and going into fixed, non-productive assets like Real Estate & Precious Metals. It's also poring into commodities. It's an in-and-out cycle. Rich industrial investors pore their money into China to use (abuse) cheap Chinese labor. And then pull the profits out of China and use the resultant spending power elsewhere--either on luxury consumer goods, or storage-of-wealth type investments. This "cycle" is a great way to perpetuate the upward redistribution of wealth that's being going on for at least the last decade. What a riot! North American non-investment (at the front end) coming back as Chinese [foreign/domestic] investment (at the back end.) I don't know why.....there is something hideously ironic about this. That the wealth siphoned off and re-distributed elsewhere comes stealing back like an embarrassed dawg...who knows not to bite the hands that feed it (just nibble around the edges, a little.) While burying all those juicy bones. The west coast of Canada would tilt right into the Pacific if not for the Asian investment in real estate - I haven't got a clue what prayer would prop it up otherwise....hail mary's and hosannas to the highest notwithstanding. (I do believe the avg. price to income ratio hath soared past 12 to 1..........and keepeth going! ......just like a babe ruth homer. looks like extra innings, people.
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