President Obama Doesn't Get It

President Obama has lashed out at financial institutions, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “Fat cats” who “don’t get it" and will demand they start lending money when he meets with top banking executives this week.

The president needs to turn his accusatory finger back on himself. It’s not Wall Street, it’s not the banks, it’s not the American people – it’s the president who doesn’t "get it." And if he’s is not careful, his meeting with the so-called “fat cats” on Monday could have the opposite effect the president wants for the American people.

Already having a frosty relationship with the banking industry, the president says he wants to meet with the top bank officials to get them to loosen their collective purse strings and start lending money to more Americans.

As the president likes to say, let me be perfectly clear – this is exactly the WRONG thing to do right now in this economy. After the mortgage meltdown and the collapse of Wall Street, the banks shuddered and then shuttered much of their lending for a reason. They want to remain solvent and hang on to their equity to stay in business.

President Bush thought (incorrectly) that by infusing money into our financial system, it would help the banks to stay solvent and keep money flowing into the economy. It didn’t and most banks held onto the TARP money only to pay it back (with interest) once the Government started dictating terms and conditions of using the money.

Now the president thinks he can invite these CEOs, these Capitalists to the White House and strong-arm them into lending again?

If we are to give money to people who don’t have the means to pay back these loans, or if the bank wants to take on more debt by risking more lending, aren’t we back where we started from about 15 months ago? Wasn’t the entire collapse of our economy because of giving someone money for something they couldn’t pay back when the note was due and they defaulted?

Barack Obama can’t have it both ways. He can’t keep giving TARP money with strings attached and he cannot influence the banking system to go back on hundreds of years of conventional wisdom on how and when to lend money, (influencing an-already unstable, tenuous market) to people and companies.

If the banking system actually listens to Barack and lends money to people and businesses who cannot pay the money back, then we are right back on the financial precipice that Hank Paulson and Nancy Pelosi warned us we were teetering on last year.

Except this time when we fall into the abyss, we can’t blame faceless Wall Street “fat cats,” we can blame one person – one man. President Obama.

Economic Recovery Equals Babies

Barack Obama said last week that the worst may be over for this country and the recession. He said this after new unemployment figures revealed that the nation’s loss actually went down from 9.5 percent to 9.4 percent. Not exactly a precipitous fall, but the president was optimistic nonetheless.

The Obama Administration, economic experts and everyday citizens all want to know when our economic prosperity will not just return, but will it last? Jobs are a lagging indicator of an economic recovery, consumer confidence is an inexact science; but one factor that can be counted as an economic downturn or recovery has nothing to do with pie charts, GDP results or a stimulus package.

It’s a simple as procreation.

The correlation between United States’ economic prosperity and recovery comes down to babies – whether we have a baby boom or baby bust.

Since we began our downward spiral into a recession in 2007, it’s impacted many different aspects of our lives. Obviously, the job sector has been steadily eroded to the tune of 7 million jobs lost – so far. That, along with a loss in consumer confidence, has had a trickle down effect on spending, savings, retirement, business, travel, recreation, as well as one part of our lives you wouldn’t expect: babies.

Since this recession is more than a year old, a new report says we are having less children. This is the first annual drop in births, since the beginning of the 21st century.

According to the National Center for Health, births were down about 68,000 babies to 4,247,000 after climbing steadily from 2002. But can the economy be blamed on people planning to postpone maternity? Experts have varying opinions but if you look at birthrates from the Great Depression in the ‘30s as well as every recession since the Post War era in our country, one thing is for sure. Birthrates go down as we pull back on our purse strings, weathering economic recessions and depressions.

So when the president comes out in a press conference with a tepid statement about how we may be back on the road to recovery, I remain skeptical.

I will be paying attention to the maternity ward at Valley hospitals to tell me when our long national economic nightmare is over.

Economic Downturn Has People Scaling Way Back

This economic downturn has spawned a new phenomenon among some Americans.

Instead of taking advantage of cellar-low mortgage rates and refinancing their house, buying foreclosed homes to sell when the housing market comes back, stockpiling money in anticipation of a bullish stock market, or just simply weathering this doom and gloomy storm of a recession, some have decided to just simply drop out. Their mantra? “Start over.” Scale Back. Less (a lot less) is more.”

They’re called Economic Survivalists, their goal is to make the least amount of money, surviving on skills not needed or used since Manifest Destiny took hold of the American Spirit back in the mid-nineteenth century.

Their cable’s been cut, their cell phones thrown in the garbage or donated to charity. The expensive SUV’s traded in for a used pickup truck; golf clubs are being sold to buy farming equipment.

Folks have had enough – and their ranks are growing. People are stockpiling food in numbers not seen since the Great Depression. Seed packets and transplants have seen a 30 percent rise in sales. The National Gardening Association released a stat that was staggering: 7 million more households are growing their own food compared to just last year.

But it goes beyond just having a green thumb or wanting to go out in the back yard and pick your supper. Economic Survivalists are serious about being off the main “grid” of society. Canning supplies have seen a 30 percent rise since last year, more people are researching and learning how to sew to mend or make their own clothes, blankets and other home items.

In extreme cases, people are just moving to live in a smaller, simpler place.

The goal? People want to feel more in control of their lives. There is a need, a desire for people to get back in control of what they have, redefining what they need and radically changing their lives. It sounds like an oxymoron, but there’s much validity to this “radical” way of living.

We have evolved so far from an agrarian society – where if you didn’t make it, grow or farm it, you didn’t need to it – to a consumption society where you can’t walk a block without seeing two Starbucks facing each other on opposite sides of the street.

Coming from a farming community, one thing I learned early on was self-sufficiency. The earth took care of you, if you took care of the earth and hardly anything went to waste. You learned to sew a button back on a shirt, not go to the mall and buy a new one. If the tractor stalled, you learned quickly how to get it running again before the sun went down. And you never took for granted that you could just rely on someone else to take care of things.

Now I don’t know if I want to throw away my iPod and cut my cable off just yet, but I do know that I feel a kindred spirit towards these people, these Economic Survivalists, who actually decide to take more control of their lives.

Self-reliance is a beautiful (and simple) thing.