Is any one Politician really any better for us than any other? Is any one likely to really bring about change? I mean, real change?
Our system is set up to make change slow. Some argue this is bad. Maybe it’s good. I don’t claim to know. Sure, it frustrates me too when government makes a seemingly simple decision so complicated. But, who knows. Knee-jerk reactions aren’t good either.
We in America like to blame people. We like to blame the latest person in office for the state of the economy. Is it Bush’s Fault, or was it Cinton before that? Will Obama fix it or is McCain more likely to?
I say neither.
It’s our own fault. All of us.
Many people seem to want to demonize politicians as liars or crooks. I think, in reality, they all are just trying to work through a really complex system the best way they can. It’s become so unwieldy, that it’s impossible to stay on top of everything. We have helped make it that complex. And, we want to hear them blame someone. So, that’s what they do. Find someone to blame.
When housing goes up 300% (give or take, depending where you live) over 3 decades and real income doesn’t even come close, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that eventually something has to give.
My father bought a house in 1985 for $30,000. He made $40,000.
A few years ago, in California, you would have had to make about $750,000 a year just to maintain that same income to debt ratio.
When I buy a house, and watch it go up in value so high that I can’t even afford to sell it and buy the same sized house across town because of the property tax increase, I don’t have to be a financial guru at some large firm in Manhattan to figure out the market is about to do something really unfavorable.
We, as a group, buy the houses at falsely inflated rates because we get sucked into the frenzy of “they are going to disappear and we will never buy one”.
Sure, you can blame the republicans for deregulation of large lending firms. Sure, you can blame Clinton for the setting up of our current global economy causing wages to decrease and jobs to go offshore.
But, when it comes right down to it. We are the ones buying into all this garbage. We vote for the laws that make it more difficult to manufacture here AND compete on price. We tell a company they have to abide by stricter labor laws and environmental laws and then go buy cheap crap made in third-world countries where the laws are looser.
And, we, as a group, buy houses we cannot afford and finance them 120%.
It’s all our fault. Everyone’s.
(this is just my 2 cents. Worth only about half a penny in today’s economy)
Tags: Bush, Clinton, Economy, Finance, jobs, labor, McCain, Obama, Palin, politics, Real Estate
September 25, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I concur. Very astute.
Don’t buy a house that you can’t pay for. It’s a simple concept.
If people stopped we wouldn’t have predatory loans to worry about- there’d be no one to be preyed upon.
September 25, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Agree with general thrust – that it’s all our faults…both in our everyday actions, as well as what we do when we go in and pull the lever on election day.
I disagree with the notion that one politician is as good as the next, and that all are equally committed to doing the right thing. They’re all various shades of grey – some on the darker side of grey, some on the lighter side. Some play to our desires for hope often, but not all the time, impractical)…others play to our fears – oft times to raise a proper concern for issues, but equally oftn to play to our darker instincts.
There’s not great evidence that the American public will change their habits anytime soon – and accordingly, we all will get what we deserve.
September 26, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Agree with everything you said. Our political system has huge overriding issues that exist in a spiderweb of interwoven, convoluted problem sets. It’s almost like the kid’s game kerplunk, you remove one problem and the rest of the system comes tumbling down. Short of a complete overhaul, as an armchair reengineer expert, I can’t see much progress in my lifetime regardless of who I vote for. How’s that for a defeatest viewpoint? (and I’m generally one of the more positive people you’ll meet on the planet). My biggest question for you Dave is this… What are you suggesting we do to address the problem??
September 26, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Hi Angie!
Thanks for the reply!
To answer your question, I don’t claim to have an answer other than we need to start the conversation that people need to be willing to hear and accept that they are the problem themselves. We want our politicians to fix things and tell us who is to blame, as long as they tell us it is someone we can fire or get rid of.
So, being politicians, who need their job, they tell their boss (us) what we want to hear. Not what we need to hear.
This nation has become so polarized with playing the blame game, that we only seem to find candidates that play the same political game and never fix anything. We always end up focusing on the same “hot button issues” like abortion, but never on what we need to do to really fix things.
So, this has been a long winded way of saying that I agree with you. I don’t see a solution in the immediate future.