Posted by
Rural Anorak on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 9:12:52 AM
I'm going to start this post with something I said I would never do; reveal a little about my personal life. Some years ago, my father told me that I needed to be careful with my spending. He thought that I was "throwing my money away" on things I thought I needed at the time. I was living at home, working; doing whatever people in their early twenties do. I was buying a lot of stuff, most without any substance at all. When Dad said I was throwing my money away, I got mad. I told him to let me make my own mistakes and I would learn better that way than by him telling me so.
Mistakes? Oh, yeah. I made my share. A few years later, Dad passed away and I was on my own (Mom had passed when I was in my teens). At first it was fine, I plugged along and tried to maintain life as normal. Then I quit my job, couldn't find another, finally found one, was laid off, and spent another four months job hunting. During that period of time, I didn't make any changes to my lifestyle. So by the time I finally found a job, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel of my savings.
That's when the words of my father came back to me, that I had been throwing my money away. That's when I started to internalize the stories he told me of his childhood. (You see, I was the last child of my parents; my siblings are quite a bit older than I.) Dad was a child when the market crashed in 1929, he grew up during the Great Depression. He told me stories of hardships and want. He told me how my grandparents worked to make a home. He told me that the people in the neighborhood all worked from before sunup to after sundown to maintain the livestock, the garden and whatever else was needed to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.
So here I am, almost forty, and I can see that the hard work needs to continue. I made some hard decisions. I took a look at what I was spending against what I was earning. There was more money going out than coming in. I needed that to stop. I started to brown bag lunch, something I hadn't done since grade school. I took at hard look at everything I was spending money on. I changed my lifestyle so that I could continue to where I am now.
Now, I watch the news and all I hear is that first this company then that company are on the brink of failure. Oh, my! Whatever should we do? Make the hard decisions, do the hard work. Some companies will fail, that's just the nature of business. (When I was in college, one of my professors said that most businesses do not last longer than fifty years.) There is no guarantee for success over the long term. We all must work hard to achieve goals. Going to Congress, with hat in hand does not lend confidence. "Please, sir, may I have some more?" didn't work for Oliver Twist and sure isn't going to work for the big banks, the financial entities, the auto industry and whoever else is begging. They need to work hard, they need to make tough decisions and not let their emotions rule. We as taxpayers need to hold Congress accountable to the use of our tax money. How does bailing out failing companies benefit? How does bailing out lead to meaningful change that will make the comanies stronger? Answer: It doesn't. All it will do is allow the status quo to continue. Given time, this current economic crisis will correct itself. That is the key, time. However, no one wants to grant the time required for the hard decisions and the hard work to take effect. They want it NOW!!! It's not going to happen.
Will the short term be difficult? Yes. Will the long term be better? Absolutely!!!!!