What is this country in for?

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rinnie

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I am just wondering what your views are on what is going to happen? Is the next president going make it worse, better? Do we really know any truth about any of them? Does their Religion play any part in your vote? Am I the only one not sure about this election? Do we really have a choice? If so what do you like or dislike?
 
rinnie said:
I am just wondering what your views are on what is going to happen? Is the next president going make it worse, better? Do we really know any truth about any of them? Does their Religion play any part in your vote? Am I the only one not sure about this election? Do we really have a choice? If so what do you like or dislike?
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thats it. its done. the pope should run for president hands down :bowdown: :bowdown2: :newidea: :juggle: :highprayer:
 
Mini_gerbel said:
thats it. its done. the pope should run for president hands down :bowdown: :bowdown2: :newidea: :juggle: :highprayer:
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This is the most wonderful thing i have heard in the 45 years of my life. Talk about getting this country in order huh! Good one.
 
rinnie said:
This is the most wonderful thing i have heard in the 45 years of my life. Talk about getting this country in order huh! Good one.
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yup. and it comin from a 15 year old! 😃

seriously though
 
I’m not sure what the OP is asking about specifically. But what the heck. I never hesitate to answer a question when I don’t even know the question. :rolleyes:

I don’t have a crystal ball concerning the next president. Right now, if I had to guess or die, I would guess that the female presidential contender will lose the primary and that her current male adversary will self-destruct before November. But right now, I wouldn’t bet money on the outcome of this election at all.

People are afraid, and they tend to do desperate things when that’s the situation. There is reason to be afraid, but not sufficient reason to be in terror. In my opinion, the financial meltdown we’re now seeing is going to be more serious than it looks like it will be right now. Part of the problem is that nobody even knows what the depth of the problem is. If I had to guess, I am going to guess that we’ll be in recession (however they want to define it) at least until the end of 2008, and think maybe mid 2009 might show a clear turnaround. It takes quite awhile to even identify what mortgages and securities based on them are going to fail. Certainly, some banks will fail. Most won’t. The biggest danger is a severe meltdown in confidence. That’s what the Bear Stearns bailout was all about. I disagreed with it at first, but later realized that a Bear Stearns failure would throw billiions of dollars of financial instruments onto a market unready to absorb them. Values would plummet and a vast number of financial institutions would be at least technically bankrupt. We could have had a failure cascade, and still could. But I don’t think we will.

More jobs are going to be lost before this is over and there are going to be a LOT of foreclosures. All these rescue plans are mostly window dressing, and won’t change much of anything. Most mortgages will not be foreclosed because most people will still have jobs and will do everything in their power to avoid foreclosure. You know, even in the Great Depression, when unemployment was 25%, 75% of the people still had jobs. This is not going to be a repeat of the 1930s.

Recovery will be slow, but will pick up steam. Whoever is in office when it does will get the credit for it. But the truth is that the president of the U.S. has almost no control over the business cycle.

Iraq will continue to be a very troubling place for two more years; a sort of troubling place for two more, and will be a potential trouble spot for decades; like South Korea is now and like Germany was for decades. No matter who is elected president, the war will continue. McCain and Clinton are major league hawks. Imaginably, Obama might pull out, but it would cause such a mess that I doubt he’ll dare to do it.

That’s my guesswork. What’s yours?
 
Ridgerunner mine are alot like yours. Except I think we are headed for a big depression. I cant really say there is anyone im crazy about to vote for. I think things are going to get worse, alot worse. But I guess to our standards, we really dont know what it is to suffer and do without. We are going to learn. I read somewhere the person with the least in this country still had more than Kings in other centurys. I think we wasted alot and took alot for granted and now we will see what we had. I think its going to be harder for our kids than us. We at least might have gotten in over our heads in spending at times, but learned how to quit and dig ourselves out. They havent a clue. With the money they make and spend is unreal. I think like you jobs are going to be really bad. I think the working man will survive, because you still need the every day things, car fixed, furnace, roof, house repairs etc. The big money jobs wont be needed, who needs someone to manage their money once they lost it all for them. I think corporate is going to take a big hit. Their life style is going to go down alot more. No more big write offs, i know it hit before its going to be worse. People are going to watch their money better. Only because they have to. Maybe its Gods way to open our eyes who knows. But I dont think its going to be alot of fun,
 
Rinnie:

I’m old enough to have been through more than one of these downturns. And, of course, my parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression. People got through even that.

In previous recessions (and I’m not persuaded yet that this one is going to be even as bad as the one in the early 1980s) it was like this or worse. The 1980s one was extremely bad. Lots of people lost assets in that one. I remember all the northern farmers who sold land up there on contract and bought much cheaper land here, also on contract, and thought they had it made. I remember being told that some of that $3,000/acre land up north went down to $500/acre. Most of them that I knew just went broke. A bad thing. But interestingly, land here went down a little, but not very much. It was already cheap. People here lost jobs, but not many. In fact, people from the “Rust Belt” came here looking for jobs. Lower wages, yes, but everything else was geared to that.

Slowly, people rebuilt their worlds to the point where people again felt themselves free to “borrow themselves rich”. But I can remember that back in the 1970s that phenomenon was even worse than it has been before this latest bubble burst. Because of inflation, interest rates were actually negative, and it seemed stupid not to borrow in order to buy stuff that kept increasing in value like clockwork. But then the piper came and demanded payment.

I see no reason to think this time around is any different from any other recession, and have some reasons to think it won’t be as bad as the 1980s one. After all, your mortgage rate didn’t go to 16% did it? As I recall, unemployment was right around 10%, which was huge compared to now. I think some banks are definitely going to go under. But back then, the whole Savings and Loan industry went under, along with a lot of banks.

Like you, I don’t think we have seen the worst of it just yet. But I don’t think we’re all that far away. I think we’ll see the bottom in late 2008 or early 2009, and you know why? Because accounting rules are different now. The companies that are losing money are not going to be able to hide losses to speak of, and they have a lot of incentive to devalue and report them all in this year. Once that’s over, people are going to start believing in the market again. Also, I learned long ago to pay attention to the gold traders. They think way out in advance. Gold is high, but it’s nowhere near as high, adjusted for inflation, as it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. About half as high, if I’m correct. It’s still up there and bobs around, but it has been trending down very slowly here lately. Those television gold buyers’ ads are starting to go away.

Rinnie, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m old enough to have started taking a “long view” of things. I no longer care whether my assets go up or down. In my lifetime, it no longer matters. My concern is for my children. I agree with you that it is going to be hard for younger people to adjust to leaner times. They’ve never seen it before. But neither did Baby Boomers until the 1980s. My duty, as I see it, is to keep from doing extraordinarily stupid things, keep my consumption level down, and all so my children and grandchildren can have an asset base. We are in a capitalistic society, after all, with socialist tendencies, both of which surge and recede. No one knows what the tax levels will be for my kids. No one can predict wage levels. A person just does what he/she can and trusts that God will provide. But God wants us to help ourselves and our children too. Oh yes. Being a little bit paranoid as I am, I have taught my kids and grandkids how to garden, orchard and raise livestock. My wife is now teaching the “grandkid generation” how to cook from basic ingredients and to sew. Maybe they’ll never need to know any of it, but you never can be too careful in this “Vale of tears”.
 
Nah, Pope can’t run for president. Even if we had elected an American. Pope is head of state of a foreign country, hence a foreign national. Not qualified under the constitution. It would need a constitutional amendment and you’re not going to get that.

Matthew
 
There are a lot of reasons to suspect that this economic downturn will be deep, and long. Just to touch on a few:

Job growth had not kept pace with population over the last 7 years. So the current job contraction is occuring to an already undersized pool.

Wages have been static for a number of years, shrinking household incomes for most Americans. This has helped drive our debt and savings rates to some of their worst levels in history.

Energy is expensive, and highly likely to remain so. In the 70s, the presence or absence of a ‘shortage’ was largely a matter of the Saud’s ‘turning the tap’. This is no longer true. There is legitimate competition on the world market and exploration is down. Because of the time it takes to exploit new finds, oil should be in relatively tight supply for at least a decade. Since we seem unlikely to withdraw from Iraq any time soon, we have destabilization shortfalls to contend with as well.

Our national debt is already huge, having nearly doubled over the last 7 years. With the credit card maxed, and having made ourselves highly dependant on countries like China, we have seriously hampered the government’s ability to soften the blow or spurn economic development. That is, we can’t spend money on infrastructure to create jobs, and we can’t use protectionist tactics to create jobs because we rely on other countries to keep loaning us money.

We have significant inflation and interest rates are already low. This pretty much takes the fed out of the equation.

The mortgage meltdown is not about liquidity. Sometimes, we have downturns because of perceptions or cashflow. In those cases, we can pour money into the system and wait for it to re-balance. But the mortgage meltdown is not such a case. The underlying investments are, in fact, grossly overvalued.

The meltdown has sucked the private funding market largely dry. There is only so much money that the government can pour in. Investment from abroad peaked long ago and has been slowing as folks put their money elsewhere. That leaves domestic cash to fund new businessnes and growth. That well is currently very dry.

On other fronts, I think that it is wishful thinking to propose that Iraq will ever fit the Germany, Japan, or even Korea model. In WW-II we not only won the war on two fronts, we were already rebuilding Europe and Japan by now. Entering our 6th year in Iraq, we’re still getting mortared in the green zone and haven’t secured the road to the airport. No way a central hotspot in the Islamic world ever tolerates a significant US military presence without violent restance. That end result is clear - a Shia Islamic state with close ties to Iran. The only question is how many more lives and $2.4B weeks we are going to spend there.
 
Ridgerunner im like you. I have 2 kids they have college degrees, But thank God i didnt get them into high debt. I made them get student loans. They both owe about 80.00 a month app. 5000 in debt a piece. I did the best i could. My biggest asset is my house at this time. It started out as a 2 bed small l bath. I had 5 acres. I bought a add. 3.5 for the last 15 years turned the 2 bedroom l bath into 5 baths huge garage, 4 bedrooms. big deck etc. All by blood and sweat. My husband did it all himself. People asked how does he know how to do all this so, well. . I said its called no choice you learn. It was all we had to pay for the material. But we did without. stayed home no life. but now our goal is to pay if off hopefully ten more years. Pray he can retire at 59. 55 is out. If we strap down live below our means we should be set. But its hard. he could lose his job any day we all could. last year we bought a wood/coal stove saved 3000 in oil. But we busted our butt. It was hard but now thats 3000 we didnt worry about. But i must say the coal was filthy. We are putting a big garden in this year, no more just for fun, its going to be saving money this year. Maybe you can help me along the way on how to do better with it. Im 45 my husbands 47. My Dad helped me alot i lost him a month ago. But he taught me Love God, Trust God be honest and you will be fine. He live that way. He ended up with owning 4 beautiful houses raising 5 kids giving us all he could on a coal miners pay. never cheated a soul so im going to do as he did. Work like a dog and save hopefully its not too late for me.
 
Benedictus said:
Alas, we have a Constitution to prevent that.
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Alas? You gotta be kidding me! You would rather have a theocracy i assume and just what? kick out everyone who is not Catholic? That kinda reduces us to a 3rd rate power in a jiffy.
 
rinnie said:
This is the most wonderful thing i have heard in the 45 years of my life. Talk about getting this country in order huh! Good one.
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Unfortunately, the Church would not clean up politics…politics would only corrupt the Church. We’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
😛
 
rinnie said:
I am just wondering what your views are on what is going to happen? Is the next president going make it worse, better? Do we really know any truth about any of them? Does their Religion play any part in your vote? Am I the only one not sure about this election? Do we really have a choice? If so what do you like or dislike?
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Many have expressed a desire to sit this one out. However, we have an obligation to vote. St. Pio made extraordinary efforts to vote. So, obtain a copy of the Catholic Answers Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics, coincidentally, available here:

caaction.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=97

No one said it would be easy to follow Christ.
 
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