Saturday, March 15, 2008

What The Hell Did They Expect?

The below post(Holy Moly, Batman) outlines the coming financial disaster we must all face soon. We will all be asking, "how did this happen?".

It's really simple.

For decades, Americans had good paying jobs, a powerful industrial base to support them. It was an industrial base that took many years of effort to build. The primary bread winner made enough money to support the entire family, allowing the spouse to stay at home and raise the kids. The concept of latch-key kids did not exist.

And then Congress and the White House started allowing mega-corporations to move our industries off shore to cheap labor countries.

More profit man, more profit. Something that cost a dollar to build in the U.S. could be built in India for ten cents, but could still be sold in the U.S. for the same old price. Profit, lots of it. And to help support those massive profits, congress and the White House created NAFTA, GAT, all those other "free-trade" agreements that eliminated tariffs, opened our borders wide to unfettered trade, and guaranteed the destruction of whatever industrial base we had left.

Want proof? Go to any American retail outlet and try to find a product made in America. Even our food and medicine is starting to come from unregulated and polluted sources in China and elsewhere.

So we lost our industrial base. Even an idiot could understand that when those industries disappeared those good jobs would disappear also, those good paying jobs Americans had, jobs that supported a lifestyle that allowed home ownership, HD TV's, SUV's, the whole banana.

But but but... Bush/Clinton/Bush were creating millions of NEW jobs to replace those lost jobs!

Yeah, right. Low paying, dead-end jobs that only illegal aliens could live on... illegal aliens that had no mortgages, no car payments, no credit cards, none of the debt load us Americans had accumulated.

None of us(with our massive debt loads) could afford to work any of those low-paying, dead-end Bush/Clinton/Bush jobs since they wouldn't even begin to cover the monthly mortgage payment. Accordingly, all these "new" jobs were filled by millions of illegals pouring across our borders.

As a result, many, many Americans started using their credit cards to make it from month-to month, you know, until they could get that "better job", which never materialized, because the government had given them all away. You know how long that lasted... until those cards maxed out. Then, guess what? The mortgage companies started offering incredible re-fi's, Where you could borrow way over the value of your home. Millions and millions of home owners took the bait.

Flush with this extra money, homeowners paid of their credit cards, bought that new flat screen TV and that SUV for momma, all manner of shiny new stuff. After all, we are all bombarded endlessly by ads that urge us to buy buy buy.

When that new money vanished, it was back to the credit cards. Now those cards are mostly maxed out again. But no re-fi bailout this time... that's already been done.

Default time. Not for just a few, but millions and millions of homeowners. Millions and millions of Americans, maxed out, deep in debt, no decent job, no way out.

This financial house of cards - built on unsustainable credit and insane governmental trade policies - has to collapse.

And it is doing exactly that.

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