BAILOUTS: KEEP BLOWING AND BUBBLE WILL BURST

By Frosty Wooldridge
December 22, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

If you blow long enough, you will burst any bubble. If you fail to maintain your brakes, they will break down at some inopportune time. Failure to maintain personal solvency in your bank account leads to bankruptcy. When you carry a balance on your credit card, you pay far higher than the original cost of the item or service.

How do you—or a nation—arrive at a point of financial breakdown? Does arrogant entitlement and over-extension beyond one’s means resonate with today’s news headlines?

On a national level, we experience the severity of living on international credit—now come home to roost. For the past 20 years, our Congress encouraged massive outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring of American jobs. That caused us to lose our manufacturing base and facilities. Thus, today, we tolerate a $700 billion annual trade deficit. We pay China, India and other third world countries to manufacture our goods at lower prices while our middle class languishes with millions of job losses—and cannot continue buying those goods.

Few Americans realize that when you shop at such stores as Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Home Depot and Target, you slit your neighbor’s and your own financial throat.

James Howard Kunstler, author of, The Long Emergency, said, “Americans failed to recognize the essential fraudulence of the idea that this destruction was ‘creative’ and would lead to a higher good, that the end justified the means, even as they watched their towns die around them. Wal-Mart and its imitators used their wealth and muscle to set up ‘superstores’ on the cheap land outside small towns and put every other merchant out of business, often destroying most of the town’s middle class. They also destroyed the local capacity to produce goods. The public enjoyed this bonanza of ‘supercheap’ manufactured goods without reckoning any of the collateral costs, which were astronomical.â€