WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE?
"Wondering if Upjohn had it wrong - will this depression last for long...? Won't you tell me: Where have all the Good Times Gone"? ("Where Have all the Good Times Gone" - from the immortal rock and roll classic album "Diver Down," from Van Halen, 1982).
Remember back when American rock (and culture) had the kind of testosterone that the boys from Van Halen had, strutting about unapologetically with great rock music like this? Wow - I really miss those days, and would trade them in a heartbeat for the mixed-up, homosexualized and feminized mess of a wussy "culture" we have now. Ditto for the mess of an economy, which brings me to the lament of this post. (Thank you, Diamond Dave, Eddie, Alex, and Michael for the inspiration. For those of you who don't know, Upjohn was a pharmaceutical company in that era which manufactured the wonder drug of the era for "feeling better"; but I'm getting a double entendre from the word "depression" here - you can figure that out, hopefully)
Things in this country are a mess. I'm sure you are aware of that, unless you are a multi-millionaire safely ensconced 100% in cash and are laughing at the piranha feeding frenzy in global financial markets; not to mention the contentious election here in the US. We've been heading down several wrong paths for most of my entire adult life. I am old enough to have heard all the same political rhetoric many times before, from both sides (if you can even call these "sides" - aren't we all tired of the poor choices we have with the current two party monopoly on power in this country? I sure am... One party likes to tax and spend, and the other likes to borrow and spend - what a choice).
I've also seen crashes, recessions, and other financial debacles several times before. There's "nothing new under the sun..." We've been there before. Does anybody remember the early 1990s Savings and Loan crisis? The RTC having to dispose of mega millions of dollars of junk real estate back then? The big stock crash of 1987? (I was there - it was incredibly painful, me being a much younger man, having enjoyed the run-up, but not enjoying the big crash down and scary, uncertain aftermath; what a time.) The year 1990 was no picnic for the markets, either. Ditto 1994; and of course the mother of all Tech crashes - the long, slow, agonizing death of the Nasdaq from the unbelievable top of March, 2000 to the smoldering ashes of late 2002/early 2003. Miserable years...
So, I ask myself (and you) this question once again, noting the signs of our current times - "Where have all the good times gone"? Up in a puff of smoke... Seemed like we might be able to muddle our way out of the mess back this past summer, but then came September - and the bottom fell out. Now world governments are throwing money, interest rate cuts, and all kinds of Keynesian fiscal stimulus at the moribund global economies (and stock markets) to try and revive the patient with whatever weapons they have in their arsenal. Will these measures revive us? Only time will tell... If we are really lucky, we will at least crawl along a bottom here; perhaps move sideways for quite some time; perhaps attempt some sort of lame "recovery." That's if we're lucky. I'm afraid to contemplate what will happen if we do not stanch the bleeding at this point. Catastrophe perhaps. Maybe Ravi Batra's old prediction (remember his book predicting a "greater Depression" in 1990?) will finally come true. He and many others have been saying it for years - just like predicting rain - one is bound to be right at some point, just like an unprogrammed VCR used to flash the correct time twice per day! "Predictions" are for fun to make peoples' tongues run, at any rate. Nonsense...
How did we get here? Many reasons. But allow me to highlight one of the most obvious and insidious reasons: we have a national penchant for gambling. It's a terrible national sin. Seems to be written into the genetic code of Americans and their financial mandarins - to take OPM and gamble with it on some hair-brained scheme. Why is Las Vegas so popular? Gambling on cruise ships? "Playing" the stock market? Speculating on over-priced real estate? We never seem to learn, and history seems to have a nasty habit of repeating itself. To paraphrase Leibniz, as quoted in Peter Bernstein's fantastic book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - "phenomena do seem to repeat themselves - BUT ONLY FOR THE MOST PART. " Leibniz's thesis was that there was indeed some type of "eternal return" of phenomena, but the returns were not precise replicas of their predecessors. Such is what we have now. The game always either migrates or mutates; it isn't precisely the same. And the gambling epidemic on Wall Street the past many years has been of epic proportions.
I'm talking about the so-called "derivatives" that we all hear about ad nauseum these days. Every jackass has a "hedge fund," and too many sheep-like have opted to invest in them, in one way or the other. Only an idiot could run a very profitable business like a bank into the ground, but, ahem - in case you hadn't noticed - that is precisely America's problem. We have a LOT of freaking idiots running our corporations. Over-rated, incredibly overpaid, and totally undeserving fools, knaves, and idiots!! They have been gambling away their shareholders money (emphasis on the shareholders' money - let's make no mistake regarding to whom corporate funds belong) on any number of fool schemes, whether it be Collateralized Debt Swaps and securities (the re-packaging of loan portfolios and selling them to the highest bidder; one group of global idiots buying another group of global idiots' debt portfolios in search of higher yields and or capital gains by selling these "securities" to the "greater fool') or by investing in hedge funds or their characteristic derivative instruments.
In plain speaking, if you have trouble understanding any of this - beware!! Be afraid!! And back away... Even Warren Buffett has stated many times that if he has any trouble understanding any investment or concept re: an investment, he backs away; that, to him, is a red flag. As it at all times should be to all of us, too. Would you care to match wits with Buffett? I didn't think so...
To try and make a long mathematical and scientific/philosophical story as short as possible, I need to stop here and refer you to four of the best books ever written on the story of investment and risk: 1.) the afore-mentioned Against the Gods... - by Peter Bernstein, which delves in depth into most every type of statistical analysis and traces their historical origins and applications; feasibility, etc.; brilliant book and readable for someone with at least one course of college statistics; 2.) Benjamin Graham's fabulous book The Intelligent Investor (with the forward by Warren Buffett and valuable appendices); 3.) John Bogle's (founder of Vanguard Investments) The Little Book of Common Sense Investing; and finally 4.) Burton Malkiel's all-time classic (and constantly re-written and updated) A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Oh how I wish I would've encountered and read these books at a much younger age - woe is me!! But I am probably like most of you - I listened to any number of what appeared to be "sophisticated" and "knowledgeable" pied pipers who constantly told me I could "beat the market" if I only heeded their "inside knowledge" or trading system/scheme. What vile horse doodle!
Now that I'm older and wiser, I have dug much deeper into the library of human knowledge and finally acquired some common sense. Credit my love affair with philosophy. An investor's best intellectual friend in times like these... At any rate - if you have money in the markets - any market - "skin in the game" is the current saying - you need to RUN - not walk - to your nearest book store/library and dig into these books.
Allow me to school you here and give you far better advice in a nutshell than I've ever gotten in my life from anyone - friend, family, or foe. You CANNOT beat the market over the long term. It is impossible. Do not try. Run from any investment concept that is not simple or that you cannot readily understand, especially from anything involving "hedges" and "derivatives," just fancy-schmanzy talk for instruments (like options and futures) that allow one to go long and short the market. Most especially run from the leveraged mutual funds and the like (Rydex made these famous) - you will lose your rear before you know it. And also run from Forex gamblers - just a bunch of adrenaline junkies who will lose whatever trading capital they have in short order.
Here's how the universe works, in a nutshell: if you had any kind of "foolproof" knowledge about how to "beat" the market, you could, in fairly short order, corner the world's wealth. Ain't going to happen... Don't give any thought to using this or that newsletter or technical voodoo system to try. Statistics prove that any phenomena ALWAYS revert to the mathematical mean. Oh, you - or even Warren Buffett - or any investment "hotshot" - might go on a statistically lucky streak and win for a good while - just enough to fool you - but your time of being skewered by cold, hard, mathematical reality is just beyond the horizon. To paraphrase the Bible - "be aware - your sins will find you out." Most every statistical phenomenon can be plotted as a bell curve (cf. height, weight, etc.) - there will always be outliers on both the right side (big winners - beating the market - they must be very smart?!) and left (losers - are they dumb? or just statistically unlucky? - I'm being facetious, of course).
Most of the players will cluster towards the big bell in the center - the mediocre center. These folks will be really lucky to match the market's overall performance over time. And the outliers will eventually revert to the mean whenever their systems or schemes run their course - and they always do (yes, even Warren Buffett. I owned 2 shares of BRKA shares way back in the mid/late 90s and did ok with them for a few years - Buffett was the greatest thing since sliced bread in those years; but over the last ten years, those shares have done nothing - barely trading just above where they were ten years ago when I sold them. At least he hasn't lost any money, as have most!!)
And this is the lesson for all those ridiculous "hedge funds" and their pompous, worthless, over-compensated, and intellectually incompetent "managers" - none of you can beat the market over the long term, and if you believe you can, you have been masterfully deceived. Right now, many of you are paying for your hubris, and your customers are getting their rears handed to them. Let's hope that part of this recent crash will prove to be a "cleansing" period and many of these hedge funds will go permanently out of business, along with their pitifully greedy "managers." Good riddance... You have distorted the global financial system for much too long...
Of course, many Americans probably thought they'd "know when the end was about to come and get out in time" with at least some of their gains. Funny thing - crashes never happen like that. Hindsight is always 20/20, and we humans are just incredible at deceiving ourselves. And in like fashion, much of the recent malaise is of OUR OWN making. Shame on us; hopefully we can learn from this mess and get back to some investing basics - like buying, holding, and dollar-cost averaging into solid, broad-based ETFs (such as the DIA and SPY); stay far away from speculations; invest only in stocks paying generous dividends that you automatically reinvest; and, very importantly - asset allocate (for our own good and financial survival - see Malkiel's book "Random Walk" for more enlightenment; plus John Bogle's book "Common Sense Investing").
Everybody got caught speculating on over-price, junky real estate (condo-flipping and the like); far too risky equities schemes, etc. Now that we've had another taste of nuclear armageddon when it comes to the markets, perhaps we can start to make a base and recover somewhat. Hopefully most of the "bombs" have gone off globally and fiscal stimulus, much lower commodity prices, and so on can start to ameliorate some of the damage. (There's no cure for high prices like high prices...)
I agree with Warren Buffett who once said that "derivatives should be banned." He likened them to "weapons of financial mass destruction." We have been witnesses to this recently. Whenever you get away from investing in actual "stuff" that has intrinsic value - as a true product or service does - you have a problem. And you need to be on the hunt for true value; something that is selling for much less than its stream of earnings would warrant; and most especially, a stock that trades for less than it can be liquidated for; something with tangible assets on its books (cash, real estate, etc.) I don't think that stocks like Altria Group or McDonalds will be going belly-up any time soon, for instance. Can't say that about some banks, insurance companies, etc. Buy into a company that has some sort of "moat" around its castle; a company selling products that consumers will always want or need; something they're "addicted" to, so to speak. Better yet - just invest in the various indexes, including the foreign indexes (Asia, Europe, and Emerging Markets - like the EEM fund), and dollar cost average into these over a lifetime; lock 'em up and forget about 'em; you'll be much better off.
Guaranteed - if I had read the four books I mentioned above many years ago, I'd be on easy street now, being the hard worker and strict, assiduous saver that I am. Unfortunately, I cannot buy back the years...
Finally, we have an election in a couple days. Looks for sure at this point that Obama will win and we will have a significant paradigm shift in Washington. At best, we'll get back to a little bit of the Clinton era. At worst, we're going to get the second term of Jimmy Carter after all! Obama's rhetoric overlaps a good bit with both of them. Americans tend to vote their pocketbooks, so in a rotten economy, such as we have now, anybody with even the slightest degree of eloquence who promises simpletons the financial moon (using whose money, I would ask??) will have an extraordinary advantage. Enter Obama... But our many national problems will remain. Some seemingly intractable. So sad and unfortunate... But I do have a glimmer of hope that we, as Americans, CAN actually begin to make our way out of this dark swamp.
It would start first with paradigm shift in ENERGY policy. And Obama is wrong about "biofuels." What a waste for such a puny payoff. FORGET biofuels - a significant move in this direction would only make commodities even more expensive due to the demand. Crappy risk-reward. McCain is right about nuclear power - we need to move in a big way in that direction as of yesterday! What are we waiting for? Win, win all the way around - domestic energy from an unlimited source, much safer technology to manage the power, and jobs, jobs, jobs for the lucky municipalities. What's not to like? Ditto for coal and natural gas technologies taking center stage. And more drilling off shore, as well - we need ALL OF THE ABOVE, pronto!!
Energy policy should be priority number one, to wean this country away from what I call "financial terrorism"; i.e., the reliance on foreign oil, which is another big source of our national economic malaise. Why do we stand for it? Incredible... Why do we stand for inefficient homes and offices when it comes to energy, as well? Why can't solar tech and and more energy efficient windows be standard issue when it comes to building homes right now? Where I live in Arizona, this need is especially acute. I worked on a Habitat for Humanity project recently where EVERY new house in the community (nice 3/2 homes in a little HFH "community" of sorts) had solar panels installed on the roofs of the homes - donated by our excellent local power company - SRP. Should be standard for all new homes here. I've seen solar panels all over the world where I've travelled, especially in the sunnier, hotter areas. We here in the US, as usual, are behind the curve.
Social Security: doesn't need to "go bankrupt." Why aren't we doing something constructive with this fund? It could be invested according to scientifically feasible, asset allocations into our markets and global markets as well - bonds, stocks, real estate trusts, energy, precious metals, etc. Just like you should be doing with your own funds, so should we as a nation be doing with Social Security, so every citizen could rest easier knowing he/she had some kind of basic social insurance pension to look forward to in their retirement years. Anything's better than what we're doing now (which is, essentially, nothing). I believe we can have our cake and eat it too on this issue, if the funds were intelligently managed. We need to start NOW.
The "good times" need not be permanently gone in this great country. I believe we're witnessing at least part of the national "cleansing" of greed and stupidity that has been inevitably coming our direction for quite some time. We have enormous challenges ahead of us, but with the light of human reason and good, old-fashioned Ayn Randian individual initiative, we can head in the right direction. As John McCain says so often: let's "Stand up and Fight"!
Whoever wins this election will have to face these challenges head on with the best team he can assemble.
Let's all get started individually right away...
TTC
Remember back when American rock (and culture) had the kind of testosterone that the boys from Van Halen had, strutting about unapologetically with great rock music like this? Wow - I really miss those days, and would trade them in a heartbeat for the mixed-up, homosexualized and feminized mess of a wussy "culture" we have now. Ditto for the mess of an economy, which brings me to the lament of this post. (Thank you, Diamond Dave, Eddie, Alex, and Michael for the inspiration. For those of you who don't know, Upjohn was a pharmaceutical company in that era which manufactured the wonder drug of the era for "feeling better"; but I'm getting a double entendre from the word "depression" here - you can figure that out, hopefully)
Things in this country are a mess. I'm sure you are aware of that, unless you are a multi-millionaire safely ensconced 100% in cash and are laughing at the piranha feeding frenzy in global financial markets; not to mention the contentious election here in the US. We've been heading down several wrong paths for most of my entire adult life. I am old enough to have heard all the same political rhetoric many times before, from both sides (if you can even call these "sides" - aren't we all tired of the poor choices we have with the current two party monopoly on power in this country? I sure am... One party likes to tax and spend, and the other likes to borrow and spend - what a choice).
I've also seen crashes, recessions, and other financial debacles several times before. There's "nothing new under the sun..." We've been there before. Does anybody remember the early 1990s Savings and Loan crisis? The RTC having to dispose of mega millions of dollars of junk real estate back then? The big stock crash of 1987? (I was there - it was incredibly painful, me being a much younger man, having enjoyed the run-up, but not enjoying the big crash down and scary, uncertain aftermath; what a time.) The year 1990 was no picnic for the markets, either. Ditto 1994; and of course the mother of all Tech crashes - the long, slow, agonizing death of the Nasdaq from the unbelievable top of March, 2000 to the smoldering ashes of late 2002/early 2003. Miserable years...
So, I ask myself (and you) this question once again, noting the signs of our current times - "Where have all the good times gone"? Up in a puff of smoke... Seemed like we might be able to muddle our way out of the mess back this past summer, but then came September - and the bottom fell out. Now world governments are throwing money, interest rate cuts, and all kinds of Keynesian fiscal stimulus at the moribund global economies (and stock markets) to try and revive the patient with whatever weapons they have in their arsenal. Will these measures revive us? Only time will tell... If we are really lucky, we will at least crawl along a bottom here; perhaps move sideways for quite some time; perhaps attempt some sort of lame "recovery." That's if we're lucky. I'm afraid to contemplate what will happen if we do not stanch the bleeding at this point. Catastrophe perhaps. Maybe Ravi Batra's old prediction (remember his book predicting a "greater Depression" in 1990?) will finally come true. He and many others have been saying it for years - just like predicting rain - one is bound to be right at some point, just like an unprogrammed VCR used to flash the correct time twice per day! "Predictions" are for fun to make peoples' tongues run, at any rate. Nonsense...
How did we get here? Many reasons. But allow me to highlight one of the most obvious and insidious reasons: we have a national penchant for gambling. It's a terrible national sin. Seems to be written into the genetic code of Americans and their financial mandarins - to take OPM and gamble with it on some hair-brained scheme. Why is Las Vegas so popular? Gambling on cruise ships? "Playing" the stock market? Speculating on over-priced real estate? We never seem to learn, and history seems to have a nasty habit of repeating itself. To paraphrase Leibniz, as quoted in Peter Bernstein's fantastic book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - "phenomena do seem to repeat themselves - BUT ONLY FOR THE MOST PART. " Leibniz's thesis was that there was indeed some type of "eternal return" of phenomena, but the returns were not precise replicas of their predecessors. Such is what we have now. The game always either migrates or mutates; it isn't precisely the same. And the gambling epidemic on Wall Street the past many years has been of epic proportions.
I'm talking about the so-called "derivatives" that we all hear about ad nauseum these days. Every jackass has a "hedge fund," and too many sheep-like have opted to invest in them, in one way or the other. Only an idiot could run a very profitable business like a bank into the ground, but, ahem - in case you hadn't noticed - that is precisely America's problem. We have a LOT of freaking idiots running our corporations. Over-rated, incredibly overpaid, and totally undeserving fools, knaves, and idiots!! They have been gambling away their shareholders money (emphasis on the shareholders' money - let's make no mistake regarding to whom corporate funds belong) on any number of fool schemes, whether it be Collateralized Debt Swaps and securities (the re-packaging of loan portfolios and selling them to the highest bidder; one group of global idiots buying another group of global idiots' debt portfolios in search of higher yields and or capital gains by selling these "securities" to the "greater fool') or by investing in hedge funds or their characteristic derivative instruments.
In plain speaking, if you have trouble understanding any of this - beware!! Be afraid!! And back away... Even Warren Buffett has stated many times that if he has any trouble understanding any investment or concept re: an investment, he backs away; that, to him, is a red flag. As it at all times should be to all of us, too. Would you care to match wits with Buffett? I didn't think so...
To try and make a long mathematical and scientific/philosophical story as short as possible, I need to stop here and refer you to four of the best books ever written on the story of investment and risk: 1.) the afore-mentioned Against the Gods... - by Peter Bernstein, which delves in depth into most every type of statistical analysis and traces their historical origins and applications; feasibility, etc.; brilliant book and readable for someone with at least one course of college statistics; 2.) Benjamin Graham's fabulous book The Intelligent Investor (with the forward by Warren Buffett and valuable appendices); 3.) John Bogle's (founder of Vanguard Investments) The Little Book of Common Sense Investing; and finally 4.) Burton Malkiel's all-time classic (and constantly re-written and updated) A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Oh how I wish I would've encountered and read these books at a much younger age - woe is me!! But I am probably like most of you - I listened to any number of what appeared to be "sophisticated" and "knowledgeable" pied pipers who constantly told me I could "beat the market" if I only heeded their "inside knowledge" or trading system/scheme. What vile horse doodle!
Now that I'm older and wiser, I have dug much deeper into the library of human knowledge and finally acquired some common sense. Credit my love affair with philosophy. An investor's best intellectual friend in times like these... At any rate - if you have money in the markets - any market - "skin in the game" is the current saying - you need to RUN - not walk - to your nearest book store/library and dig into these books.
Allow me to school you here and give you far better advice in a nutshell than I've ever gotten in my life from anyone - friend, family, or foe. You CANNOT beat the market over the long term. It is impossible. Do not try. Run from any investment concept that is not simple or that you cannot readily understand, especially from anything involving "hedges" and "derivatives," just fancy-schmanzy talk for instruments (like options and futures) that allow one to go long and short the market. Most especially run from the leveraged mutual funds and the like (Rydex made these famous) - you will lose your rear before you know it. And also run from Forex gamblers - just a bunch of adrenaline junkies who will lose whatever trading capital they have in short order.
Here's how the universe works, in a nutshell: if you had any kind of "foolproof" knowledge about how to "beat" the market, you could, in fairly short order, corner the world's wealth. Ain't going to happen... Don't give any thought to using this or that newsletter or technical voodoo system to try. Statistics prove that any phenomena ALWAYS revert to the mathematical mean. Oh, you - or even Warren Buffett - or any investment "hotshot" - might go on a statistically lucky streak and win for a good while - just enough to fool you - but your time of being skewered by cold, hard, mathematical reality is just beyond the horizon. To paraphrase the Bible - "be aware - your sins will find you out." Most every statistical phenomenon can be plotted as a bell curve (cf. height, weight, etc.) - there will always be outliers on both the right side (big winners - beating the market - they must be very smart?!) and left (losers - are they dumb? or just statistically unlucky? - I'm being facetious, of course).
Most of the players will cluster towards the big bell in the center - the mediocre center. These folks will be really lucky to match the market's overall performance over time. And the outliers will eventually revert to the mean whenever their systems or schemes run their course - and they always do (yes, even Warren Buffett. I owned 2 shares of BRKA shares way back in the mid/late 90s and did ok with them for a few years - Buffett was the greatest thing since sliced bread in those years; but over the last ten years, those shares have done nothing - barely trading just above where they were ten years ago when I sold them. At least he hasn't lost any money, as have most!!)
And this is the lesson for all those ridiculous "hedge funds" and their pompous, worthless, over-compensated, and intellectually incompetent "managers" - none of you can beat the market over the long term, and if you believe you can, you have been masterfully deceived. Right now, many of you are paying for your hubris, and your customers are getting their rears handed to them. Let's hope that part of this recent crash will prove to be a "cleansing" period and many of these hedge funds will go permanently out of business, along with their pitifully greedy "managers." Good riddance... You have distorted the global financial system for much too long...
Of course, many Americans probably thought they'd "know when the end was about to come and get out in time" with at least some of their gains. Funny thing - crashes never happen like that. Hindsight is always 20/20, and we humans are just incredible at deceiving ourselves. And in like fashion, much of the recent malaise is of OUR OWN making. Shame on us; hopefully we can learn from this mess and get back to some investing basics - like buying, holding, and dollar-cost averaging into solid, broad-based ETFs (such as the DIA and SPY); stay far away from speculations; invest only in stocks paying generous dividends that you automatically reinvest; and, very importantly - asset allocate (for our own good and financial survival - see Malkiel's book "Random Walk" for more enlightenment; plus John Bogle's book "Common Sense Investing").
Everybody got caught speculating on over-price, junky real estate (condo-flipping and the like); far too risky equities schemes, etc. Now that we've had another taste of nuclear armageddon when it comes to the markets, perhaps we can start to make a base and recover somewhat. Hopefully most of the "bombs" have gone off globally and fiscal stimulus, much lower commodity prices, and so on can start to ameliorate some of the damage. (There's no cure for high prices like high prices...)
I agree with Warren Buffett who once said that "derivatives should be banned." He likened them to "weapons of financial mass destruction." We have been witnesses to this recently. Whenever you get away from investing in actual "stuff" that has intrinsic value - as a true product or service does - you have a problem. And you need to be on the hunt for true value; something that is selling for much less than its stream of earnings would warrant; and most especially, a stock that trades for less than it can be liquidated for; something with tangible assets on its books (cash, real estate, etc.) I don't think that stocks like Altria Group or McDonalds will be going belly-up any time soon, for instance. Can't say that about some banks, insurance companies, etc. Buy into a company that has some sort of "moat" around its castle; a company selling products that consumers will always want or need; something they're "addicted" to, so to speak. Better yet - just invest in the various indexes, including the foreign indexes (Asia, Europe, and Emerging Markets - like the EEM fund), and dollar cost average into these over a lifetime; lock 'em up and forget about 'em; you'll be much better off.
Guaranteed - if I had read the four books I mentioned above many years ago, I'd be on easy street now, being the hard worker and strict, assiduous saver that I am. Unfortunately, I cannot buy back the years...
Finally, we have an election in a couple days. Looks for sure at this point that Obama will win and we will have a significant paradigm shift in Washington. At best, we'll get back to a little bit of the Clinton era. At worst, we're going to get the second term of Jimmy Carter after all! Obama's rhetoric overlaps a good bit with both of them. Americans tend to vote their pocketbooks, so in a rotten economy, such as we have now, anybody with even the slightest degree of eloquence who promises simpletons the financial moon (using whose money, I would ask??) will have an extraordinary advantage. Enter Obama... But our many national problems will remain. Some seemingly intractable. So sad and unfortunate... But I do have a glimmer of hope that we, as Americans, CAN actually begin to make our way out of this dark swamp.
It would start first with paradigm shift in ENERGY policy. And Obama is wrong about "biofuels." What a waste for such a puny payoff. FORGET biofuels - a significant move in this direction would only make commodities even more expensive due to the demand. Crappy risk-reward. McCain is right about nuclear power - we need to move in a big way in that direction as of yesterday! What are we waiting for? Win, win all the way around - domestic energy from an unlimited source, much safer technology to manage the power, and jobs, jobs, jobs for the lucky municipalities. What's not to like? Ditto for coal and natural gas technologies taking center stage. And more drilling off shore, as well - we need ALL OF THE ABOVE, pronto!!
Energy policy should be priority number one, to wean this country away from what I call "financial terrorism"; i.e., the reliance on foreign oil, which is another big source of our national economic malaise. Why do we stand for it? Incredible... Why do we stand for inefficient homes and offices when it comes to energy, as well? Why can't solar tech and and more energy efficient windows be standard issue when it comes to building homes right now? Where I live in Arizona, this need is especially acute. I worked on a Habitat for Humanity project recently where EVERY new house in the community (nice 3/2 homes in a little HFH "community" of sorts) had solar panels installed on the roofs of the homes - donated by our excellent local power company - SRP. Should be standard for all new homes here. I've seen solar panels all over the world where I've travelled, especially in the sunnier, hotter areas. We here in the US, as usual, are behind the curve.
Social Security: doesn't need to "go bankrupt." Why aren't we doing something constructive with this fund? It could be invested according to scientifically feasible, asset allocations into our markets and global markets as well - bonds, stocks, real estate trusts, energy, precious metals, etc. Just like you should be doing with your own funds, so should we as a nation be doing with Social Security, so every citizen could rest easier knowing he/she had some kind of basic social insurance pension to look forward to in their retirement years. Anything's better than what we're doing now (which is, essentially, nothing). I believe we can have our cake and eat it too on this issue, if the funds were intelligently managed. We need to start NOW.
The "good times" need not be permanently gone in this great country. I believe we're witnessing at least part of the national "cleansing" of greed and stupidity that has been inevitably coming our direction for quite some time. We have enormous challenges ahead of us, but with the light of human reason and good, old-fashioned Ayn Randian individual initiative, we can head in the right direction. As John McCain says so often: let's "Stand up and Fight"!
Whoever wins this election will have to face these challenges head on with the best team he can assemble.
Let's all get started individually right away...
TTC
posted by thoughtful conservative at 10:34 PM
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