Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

[goadam1]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

This statement is wrong:
Agreed - also, in my opinion it is what is wrong with business as well. Instead of saving money in good times and avoiding debt as much as possible businesses have become used to leasing buildings, vehicles and even production equipment rather than paying for them - when the economy goes south their overheads end up killing them off. Governments are doing the same thing.

[goadam1]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

sorry to hear you will be losing your job.

[metalman]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

sorry to hear you will be losing your job.

enjoy your posts but have trouble figuring out who you are replying to... pls use the 'quote' button that quotes the post you are answering... else hard to follow. thx.

[Spartacus]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

What to do to build for the future? How to finance it?

Turn the military into a strictly defensive one

that will free up enough resources to pave the US with roads 10 times over,
then bury the US in a foot of electical wire and fiber optics
then bury the US in dams and windmills and solar panels
put enough money into education to produce 10 times the number of engineers and researchers and so on (although they'd be out of work after the infrastructure push is done ...)

And that's in the first year alone ; )

Yes, I exaggerate. So sue me. God knows there's enough lawyers to sue everyone 100 times over ; (

[jandkmeyer]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

We are going to need both capital and the profit motive of entrepreneurs to move us forward. Rather, we need a simple tool and a simple philosophy behind it to guide its use: that we're all in this together, that we need to transition from a FIRE to a Production based economy, and some of us are more able than others to help finance that transition, and at the moment there is no way anyone can help do so even if they wanted to.[/QUOTE]

[jandkmeyer]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

A common theme I am seeing in the responses is that people see the obvious crony capitalism, are repulsed by it and won't come together as a cooperative mass until they believe it is gone. I thought the new administration would identify that problem and deal with it, but it hasn't happened. If/when they fix that problem, the challenge will be keeping the not-so-obvious crony capitalism from derailing the solutions. Obvious recent examples: War on Terror, Iraq war, ethanol, "clean" coal, bailout, bailout, bailout...

I think we need to focus on things larger than a few banks or even a few economies. We need to bail out the planet - our entire life support system with planetary scale projects that work.

PS - Sorry for the sloppy work - first time poster

[goadam1]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

Lol. I can't figure out the quote system. Plus I was writing from the playground on my iphone while my kids climbed trees.

[ricket]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

Lol. I can't figure out the quote system. Plus I was writing from the playground on my iphone while my kids climbed trees.

It's quite easy actually. Take the text you want to appear as quoted, and add a "[ quote ]" before-hand, and when you want to finish quoting text, add the ending tag "[ /quote ]". (Be sure to remove the spaces)

You can actually type them yourself as many times as you want.

This is a quote

And so is this one...

You can even add in your own source too!

[LazyBoy]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

As a small business owner I can tell you that you are wrong. Many business use lines of credit and confuse the crdit with income. But a business can only hold so much cash as a cushion. I keep a years worth of basic overhead as savings. But if I can't generate revenue then what is he point of running a business out of past profit

I've never run a business, but it seems to me that the advantages would be

• being able to run for a year without revenue if you choose to (Can you get enough credit to do that?), or
• being able to call it quits while you've still got some profit, instead of going under owing other people and jeopardizing their businesses.

[LazyBoy]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

On the plus side:

• We have a surfeit of human capital, millions of well educated people who are willing to work hard

I worry about assumptions like this. It seems a little rah rah. I think Americans have gotten lazy. I know, I'm one of them. I'm lucky enough to have a career that pays well and involves sitting at a desk (knock wood). I'm 45, overweight and out of shape. If I had to physically work hard for a living, like my father did, I wouldn't last a week.

My mom lives in an area that's been depressed for years. There are a lot of people there that have been sitting around not working for years. Maybe actual hunger will change this, assuming there are opportunities. Maybe it will turn a large percentage to crime.

This is not the greatest generation anymore.

Everyone will be quite shocked by how quickly the US can recover once the right people with the right philosophies take charge of those institutions.

Who are the right people and how would they possibly get in charge?

[phirang]

Re: Can Anything Bring Down the Monthly Payment Consumer? Revisited - Eric Janszen

Yes, I'm being intentionally provocative here, and glad I've smoked out comments from members of the community we have not heard from before.

Consider our unfortunate situation.

On the minus side:

• The FIRE Economy is collapsing
• Unemployment is rising rapidly
• We have minimal savings
• Our credit is in question

On the plus side:

• We have a surfeit of human capital, millions of well educated people who are willing to work hard
• We have strong institutions that took generations to develop, albeit under marginal management lately
• We have a strong rule of law, although poorly enforced as of late, especially for property rights, which is why so much is invented here

What to do to build for the future? How to finance it?

Plus side:

1) China and India also have plenty of human capital. Thanks to GATT/WTO, we now have slave wages for both blue(if they can even find a job) and white collar workers. Working hard is irrelevant: no one works harder than slaves in a Liberian diamond mine.

2) I really don't understand point #2. Maybe you're hoping to get a job from Obama or something. Seriously ridiculous, but wtf do I know...

3) We have a VERY strong rule of law for those who not of the $1M+ campaign contribution club: for the plebes, it's fear and intimidation as usual. For the oligarchs, well, they write the laws, and so how can they break them??? :rolleyes:

How to finance it? Infrastructure bonds? You realize that even WITH retrenching entitlements and empire, we'll need very high interest rates to pull money back in from our QE? That'll cause a SECOND recession if this current collapse doesn't swallow us whole.

So long as US workers make "too much money" for US companies to invest domestically, there's 0 incentive to upgrade infrastructure: there's already massive overcapacity in every industry globally. The only possible catalyst to saturate that capacity would be a major war.

Finally, the social engineering/trade tax using carbon credits is asinine: collapsing industry alone will sort out our CO2!