Happy Father’s Day, Dads! Here is hoping that you have a great day. While you are having that great day, take note of some of my observations to think about over dinner later on or maybe after the rest of the family has settled down to video games and television. I hate to be the sober driver in our little alcoholic binge called life but I figure somebody should touch on what is going on around us. Let me know your thoughts by posts and links afterwards, will ya?
Based on what I am reading and from what I am seeing, I think that I may have been close to the mark in some of my previous entries here and here. When I read that places like Detroit are without national chain stores that tells me that at a very high level business doesn’t want to open anything up in areas where they feel there isn’t any money.
The only way that the large chain stores can make their nut to cover their rent or mortgage payments on their stores is to have regular customers who can come in daily. That is certainly the case with grocery stores where the perishables (milk, bread, eggs, meat, etc) spoil after a few days despite the best efforts at refrigeration and other shelf items just collect dust and cobwebs. That isn’t a good way to make money. It is poor business and I wouldn’t invest in places like that. With people out of work and despite unemployment supposedly slowing, unless people are at a full time job, they aren’t going to have the income stream to support living. Sure they still will be eating but they will look for better bargains than some of the stores can provide.
Failing that, people without money resort to five finger discount. Let’s face it, if people are hungry, they will do what they can to eat. One hopes that people can take the high ground but when people are starving, social norms go out the window.
I have no idea the exact criteria that is being used because you and I both know that statistics can be used to represent anything that people want. One needs to understand the underlying information and who gains when numbers are changed. Welp, it certainly would look really depressing if the numbers showed we were at 20 percent unemployment and based on what I saw during tax season and talking to friends and relatives, it is hard to find people who haven’t been hit by the Depression.
I seriously don’t see how any kind of recovery is going to take place until we get back to full employment. Interest rates can’t go up because that will clobber the remaining eighty percent of the people who are trying to hang on to what they are doing right now.
Pundits are saying that a year from now we will have nationally 10 percent unemployment and here in California 12 percent. I submit to you now that we are at 20 percent realistically. I base this on the fact that at least regionally, there is one house on every block that is for sale. There are tons of apartments for rent and people just aren’t moving here in droves any more.
A lot of people from Mexico and South America have either started moving back home or migrating to other states or nations. I don’t see the bevy of workers all around looking for day labor like I use to. Times must be tough.
What can you do to make money from this? People are looking to save money and will pay a little money if it ends up saving them or making them a lot. Yes, everybody expects something for free but the saner people out there realize that if everything is for free, that means that their worth dwindles from $25 an hour to free just as well. It is tough to feed a family of four or six on free.
Do what you can to get manufacturing started in this country as well. Manufacturing is great because it is something solid that can’t be taken elsewhere easily. It might be undercut in cost to be made but if you are savy enough to be in business there are other things that you might be able to market with this stuff (like killer service).
I’ve talked about the spiral of money and we really need people to be working so they can spend money to keep things spinning. We need people to save money too and if their income is halfed or gone altogether, all bets are off as to what is going to happen.
Please keep the emails and letters going to our representatives and if you are in business, thank you for doing what you can to keep people employed. If you are out of work, keep looking and think about what you can do to make money from this current environment.
If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.
Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.
Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.
Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.
Kim Isaac Greenblatt
Unemployment Must Be at 20 Percent