TOUGH TIMES AHEAD?

Changes In My Lifetime. In one of my earlier posts, I quoted one of the problems we must overcome in the future is the unstainability of our consumer lifestyle, purchased with government and personal debt. No matter what our economy does, it is my opinion that we can't continue to live the way we are living. The house in the picture is the one my family moved into in 1947 when I was 9 years old. This picture was taken last year and, with the exception of a bedroom and a bathroom, which we added in 1948, it still looks about the same now as it did then. We really felt we were living in luxury after the addition of that bathroom, not that we had two bathrooms like most folks have now, it was that we had one. That's right, there was an outhouse in the back. Mom and Dad had a bedroom and my brother and I slept in the living room. Know where the lumber came from to build the house? We bought several chicken houses from the poultry farm down the street and salvaged the lumber from those to build this house.



Sound Familiar? Sounds like what the old folks used to tell us about walking miles to school in waist deep snow. Sounds like I was really deprived but actually, I wasn't because that was the way many families lived. Looking closely, you can see why I didn't have to shovel snow off the sidewalks. There were no sidewalks, no TV, no microwave, no garage door opener (no garage), no air conditioners, no cell phones, no computers, no satellite dish, and no gasoline powered yard tools. The reason is that most of these things hadn't been invented yet. We didn't miss having those things because we didn't know what they were. This brings me to a point that I have been hearing for years. "Luxuries, once sampled, become necessities." This is undoubtedly true. Even the less affluent among us have at least one television and nobody pushes a lawn mower any more. Just about anyone with a garage has a garage door opener. You could fit three of the houses like the one my dad built into the one I own today (not large by today's standards).

I Am Not Suggesting that We Live Like The Way I Grew Up. We have earned an improved standard of living from the 1940's but perhaps we've gone too far. The best evidence of that is the proliferation of mini-storage buildings that we rent to keep the stuff we have but can no longer find room for in our houses. Last night I saw a TV show about estate sales. We spend years collecting treasures only to have our children sell for a fraction of what we paid, give to charity, or throw in the trash. Most of us can live on less without a huge sacrifice. Advances in technology have allowed the average among us to live better than the wealthy did when I was growing up.


We Complain About Excessive Government Spending. We all want to eliminate fraud and waste in government and undoubtedly there is plenty of that to cut. Unfortunately, trimming the fat won't be enough to stop our unsustainable federal borrowing practices. We will have to cut lean also. I love my social security and medicare. I think I deserve it because I paid for it. I have never sat down and gone through the exercise of determining what I would have if that money had been invested at a market rate of return in financial assets but, whatever the reason, the government has promised me more than they can deliver. Medicare is the best health insurance I have ever had. I can walk into the doctors office, get treated, and walk out the door without paying a dime. Even when I was a struggling college student, I couldn't do that. This is a great, but unsustainable, benefit. A ten dollar co-payment would allow the government to pay the doctors a little more while still retaining some to keep from passing a huge burden to grand children. People complain that we aren't getting cost of living raises, what would happen if they cut benefits by 3%? A person making $500 a month would lose $15 and someone making $2000 a month would lose $60. That would be a huge help to the system and most retirees could afford that to keep from passing this huge debt to our heirs.

Imagine What Would Happen If They Did That. Those who sponsored the legislation would be thrown out of office no later than the next election. People feel entitled to what they have been promised (thus the word, "entitlements"). It may not be fair, but things like this are what needs to be done. We don't need the government to promise us even more things that they can't afford, we just need them to admit that they can't afford what they have promised us already and tell us what has to be cut. This is a fantasy. Most likely, it will never happen.

A Sign At The Grand Canyon Tells It Like It Is. It says "Don't Feed The Animals. They will become dependent on human food and lose the ability to forage on their own." If we figured that out for wild animals, why can't we figure it out for ourselves. We have trained our citizens to depend on government handouts yet we think we can sustain these handouts while 47% of our population pays zero federal taxes. Not only that, we want to pay even less. It is my belief that we will have to attack our fiscal problems from both ends. More taxes and less spending. The sooner we start making these tough decisions, the less traumatic it will be when we have no choice.