Money - What Dreams Are Made Of.

It's already hard enough to get out of bed in the morning, and tomorrow's
outlook is not getting much better There are millions of people out of
work, and their hopes of finding an oasis in the middle of the desert are
diminishing quickly.
A story from FOX news on February 20th, 2010 entitled
"Getting Back Lost Jobs Could Take 5-Plus Years" provides some scary
information.

"So many jobs have been lost that the U.S. must run hard just to keep from
losing more ground. Despite the election-year emphasis on job creation by both
parties, the short-term outlook is bleak.

While many economists believe the recession is technically over, nearly 15
million Americans remain unemployed. Six million of them have been out of work
for more than half a year.

President Barack Obama is asking for almost $300 billion more for recession
relief and job formation. The House last December passed a $154 billion spending
bill focused on jobs. The Senate is due to debate a far more modest version on
Monday, but appears bogged down in partisan bickering.

With or without new legislation, reducing a jobless rate that's now just under
10 percent to prerecessionary rates of about half that won't happen soon,
especially as government efforts to prop up the economy begin to wind down.

It could take up to five years or more just to get back to even."

(Visit http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/20/getting-lost-jobs-plus-years/
for more details.)

Here are some of the reasons I think that it will take even longer than
we all hope it will to step back onto solid ground as a nation, if we ever
do at all.

My main concern is that the government has only tried to accomplish one
thing, and that is to put a band-aid on the problem. As it says in the clip from the article
above, all the government bailout programs are accomplishing is barely supporting
the wobbly economy to try and delay the inevitable in hopes that it would soften the blow.

In my eyes, what they have really been doing is re-cocking the clenched
fist that bloodied the faces of half of America. With the housing incentives
that have been dragged out, many unsure Americans have been lured
into buying a home they wouldn't have purchased if there hadn't been a strong
push for them to. Of course, the purpose of their efforts was to jump start the droopy economy
by tinkering with the American Dream - what I think has been the result is similar to a hard shot of caffeine or even worse,
cocaine. It may be making people think things are improving, but as it's been said before,
the bigger they are, the harder they fall. As soon as the caffeine "kick"
wears off, I'm afraid we will be worse off than we thought.

Not only are the jobs that are still there turning around to new people
less frequently due to the fact that the people that have them and would have been
retired are holding on to them longer because they can no longer survive on
what they have saved but most newly created jobs are nowhere near
the same caliber of the ones that are gone. The jobs we have lost are not coming back - they are
either in India to stay, or they have become obsolete through the advances in
technology that are bound to overtake even more jobs.


What I feel should be the governments focus is not how to prolong the suffering by trying to minimize peoples losses, but we should let the recession run its course. There is no faster way to bring it to an end than to stare it in the face and deal with it head on. Like pulling a tooth, or a sliver out of your skin, the anticipation is much worse than the actual pain. People will survive - life will go on. Meanwhile, our focus and resources should be put towards educating the population of new ways to create wealth. The jobs that are gone are gone. We can either cry about it, or get over it and find a solution to the problem, but trying to "prop" the economy up is not going to solve any of them. It is only raising hopes that will inevitably come crashing back down. There are solutions out there, we just have to open our eyes and adjust to the new paradigm of thinking - one that includes such industries as the formerly despised one of network marketing.