Monday, September 29, 2008

What if?

Jazz Shaw, assistant editor at The Moderate Voice poses some thought provoking "what if" questions about what an economic recession could mean to Americans.

What if the stock market fell from 11,000 to 5,000?

What if loose credit evaporated overnight?

What if people who took outrageous mortgages and debt were sent back to a reset point?

What if people had to rent a place to live and save up until they had a reasonable down payment and mortgage payments they could afford?

What if some people lost their highest paying jobs and had to take lower paying, local jobs (or even two) to make ends meet?

What if credit became tight to the point where average households couldn’t have nine credit cards each, couldn’t spend 133% of their annual income every year and actually had to save up money to buy things?

What if they had to save their money for retirement in fixed rate savings accounts and lower interest bonds or treasury bills?

What if CEOs couldn’t make hundreds of millions per year because the market collapsed on them?

What if companies who ship American jobs overseas and offshore their manufacturing operations no longer had a market to sell their goods at “home” because nobody could afford to buy them?

What if this exhausted, heavily-whipped engine of commerce collapsed on its knees on the track?

What if those companies had to begin hiring people back home to make their products so there would be a market for them again?

What if speculation became impractical because people would only pay what things were actually worth?

What if people couldn’t afford the next biggest flat screen TV and the next thinnest Jesus Phone every season and had to make do with what they had for a few years?

What if manufactured items had to focus on quality instead of disposability because consumers could not afford new versions every year?

What if we had to repair some of our own clothes and household items so they would last longer?
What if some of us had to either grow some of our own food or provide services for people who provided food for us?

What if we all had to sweat out some hard work and hard times and eliminate all of our empty debt and actually live within our means?

What if our government was actually forced to do the same?

What if?

1 comment:

Nina May Art said...

what if you did not blame the housing crisis on poor or low income or home buying Americans and actually learned some history about the Federal Reserve and the corrupt corporate bankers?

Home mortgages accounted for I think 30 or 3 billion dollars of this crisis. Either way if the fed paid off the mortgages it would have been a tiny sum compared to this disaster.

If you would like to find out more about money there are a few simple movies that are free that can teach you. One is called Money as Debt and just research the Federal Reserve and what it actually is. You will be completely surprised. I was shocked when I actually looked into it.

Beware though researching things like this will make you go further and further into topics you never thought that you would look into,

like 9/11 press for truth which is about the families of 9/11 or truth rising

all free info on google video.

sorry to be sarcastic at the top just hoped I would get your attention