Country for Sale by Original Owner

Ok kids, its time for a new economic structure. One that is not solely based around greed and corruption. I'm a bit sick and tired of all these economists and financial executives pretending that they didn't know what they were doing. How they Alan Greenspan thought sub-prime mortgages were somehow a fantabulous idea. Here is the bottom line. I'm not a wal-street financial wizard or a some economist from Harvard or the CEO of some mega-corp or on the board of directors of some world bank but I could have told you that if you loan a fuck load of money to a person that can hardly afford to pay for their cell phone bill every month you are eventually going to have a problem.

Back when I purchased my house I spent a lot of time trying figuring out how much money I could spend. I looked at a few websites. Did a few calculations and with an interest rate of 4.5% came up with a comfortable number for my income at the time. That amount was $900 a month. At the time it was a reasonable amount, I purchased a lovely 100 year old Victorian house on just under half an acre for $140,000 no money down. Now the ONLY reason I was able to purchase this house was because the interest rate was 4.5%. I with my simple little mortgage calculator knew that if the rate was at 7% it would jack up the monthly payment to $1135 a month. Thats an extra $235 a month. A car payment. It was really simple to see that I wouldn't be able to purchase a house at that price. It was simple COMMON SENSE. So of course I still had another option though. It was called an ARM loan. Its basically is a loan were I start out at a low interest or interest only payment or an allotted monthly payment rate then after 3 or 5 years depending on the type of loan my interest rate will become variable. Oh a knight in shining armor! So the idea is that you can purchase a $250000 house for "the same price as renting an apartment". I'm sure that you have heard that little catch phrase a million times over the last 7 years or so. Remember that little saying that your mother always told you, "If its too good to be true then it probably is...". Well for all you loan officers that got rich a few years ago and are playing dumb out there this is one of those too good to be true moments. Lets do the basic math. You have your introductory monthly payment and since my current rent is $700 a month we will go with that. $700 a month is do-able for most people. Even for some that are making a low wage. Well hell a $250000 house for $700 a month thats great! My dream of purchasing a home will finally come true. Well lets see though... That price is only good for 5 years what happens then? Well a $250000 loan at a variable rate that went up to 7% during that 5 years makes my monthly payment somewhere around $2027 a month. Of course with all my 50 cent raises I'll be making more money by then. Housing bubble? No, there will never be a housing bubble. So since I am not a complete idiot, like 1/5 of all of you dip-shits that blindly trusted your loan officer and didn't take the 30 minutes to figure out how much you can afford, I purchased my humble house with no money down and a fixed 4.5% rate. 5 years later I sold it for $200000 and made about $50000.

So back to our economy. We have a very unique system here in the US. Our economy is built around consumer spending (thanks Franklin D!). Basically its an engine. The more people spend the more it grows. Sounds great! And it worked for a while. Got us out of the great depression. But then this interesting thing started to happen. Instead of families being able to afford a nice house and a nice car on one income and having a nice retirement to look forward to, both husband and wife had to work. Benefits got stripped away. People were spending so much of their income just to LIVE that they needed to borrow money. And of course the cocaine of business is to make money off of money. There really isn't a more corrupt system than that except for may be insurance which is probably the meth of business. So people get into debt, greedy rich people get richer and everyone else gets poorer. But there is an underlying infection in this system its called the stock market. You see big businesses these days are tied into the stock market. They are required to keep their stock holders happy. Otherwise people won't invest and/or they may potentially sue you. So corporations are under a lot of pressure to increase profits so shares go up and stock holders and investor make more money. The idea being you invest your money to help this business grow then after a while you cash in your stock and you get paid for investing. It sounds great in theory (just like communism does) but in reality its not sustainable. Why you ask? Because there are basically 2 ways you can increase profits in a business. One is the long way. Which is making a good QUALITY brand of products that people will want to purchase and continue to purchase. Its making a long term investment and making decisions that take time but are ultimately rewarding. Like planting an apple tree and nurturing and pruning and treating all parts of the tree with respect so that you will have bushels of fruit for years to come. Just like how little baby Jesus taught people how to fish. Well in this day and age that takes too long. People don't have the patience or the attention span to put that much time and energy into something. So that leads us to the other way, the quick way. You start with a good product and market the hell out of it so tons of people buy it. Then you decrease expenses so that you increase profits. So you buy your apples from the store and hope that you have enough money to keep buying apples. So thats what most businesses do these days. Lets say you get drunk one day and decide to start a company that makes and sells oh lets say something that lots of poor suckers will pay too much for. Say, bottled water aptly named Purest Tap Water on Earth. Its great you are off to a good start, you have a strong brand and people are hooked. Thats great for a few fiscal quarters. Now what? Well since you are a hard hitting top CEO that graduated from Harvard you know what to do. Its easy you trim some fat and hold back supplies to increase the price. Great you are making more profits than your share holders can shake a stick at. For a few more quarters at least. So use that brain of yours whats next. Lean up the employee benefits a bit and may be source a cheaper product. Thats great! You are brilliant. The board of directors loves you. So whats next? Well we could just move our production over to China, layoff most of our employees, but first cut back on benefits some more so some of those people quit and we won't have to cover their severance. Well that worked ok but our stock is level and is actually going down a bit. Oh what now it tanked almost overnight you will have to sell this business off. Well its a good thing you won't be held accountable. Well just move on to the next company..... So what happened? Well its quite simple. The quality of your product goes to shit people stop buying your product, it too expense since consumers don't have any money because all of your college frat buddies running businesses down the road whom they work for took away their benefits and jobs just like you did. See corporations seem to forget that there is a system to the business. Employees are not just an expense. They are the engine that make the business run. They don't just make your product a reality they also control the quality of the product and also consumers of those products. A business is just like spokes on a wheel. Yes you can make the tire cheaper by removing the spokes of the wheel but take away too many your tire is flimsy and will eventually fall apart. Even a child without an MBA from Stanford running a lemonade stand understands that. So this is what our economy has become because of the greed of the stock market and greed of the rich. A flimsy tire. The quality of the US is literally going down and getting more expensive. We have outsourced our jobs and cutback on benefits. We have put people into so much credit debit that the businesses loaning the people loaning money are selling off their businesses. Unemployment is starting to go up. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. People are treating the US dollar like it has herpes for the first time. Its time for a new system folks. Read and understand the next sentence very carefully... It is "too good to be true" to have a sustainable economic system based solely on increasing profits. It is simply not possible, just like communism failed so will consumerism. Its because people are greedy. And because of the greed of the nation soon we will have to sell off America. Any buyers? Better brush up on your Mandarin.