We Need Optimism not Fear Mongering

Well, my name isn't Joe and I'm not a Plumber but my family and I are one of those average families that Joe represented in our most recent election campaign. We made a modest living, raised two children and lived within our means as best we could. We bought several homes as our family grew and in later years as our children got older we saved what we could toward our 401K's in hopes of supplementing our pensions and social security.

We struggled in our early years and not until we had reached beyond middle age did we start to see some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel toward our retirement future. Finally, the mortgage was gone, the credit cards were paid off and what are we faced with? The greatest fallout of our market system since the crashes of 1929 and more recently 1987.

We should have seen it coming with the exposure of the Enron debacle and the TYCO president going to jail for tax fraud sending their employee 401K's into a crash dive. In some ways my family was lucky, with good advise from some wise investors from an earlier time. We were fortunate, I listened and did not as the saying goes "put all my eggs in one basket". Even with that caution I still lost 30% of my investments and when retirement time came for me I still had not gained it all back. We did see the glimmering of what was about to happen though and given our ages we moved almost all our investments to the money market side of our accounts to help protect them.

What most concerns me now though is our news media. They have taken every chance to bombard us with how bad things are, how we are in a spiraling fall from which we may never recover. Words like "Pending Disaster", "Catastrophic Fallout" and "Economic Failure" are all part of their engaging news reporting.


How should these "stimulus packages / spending bills" be spent? My first inclination is that we need to get people back to work. Start moving forward again. Stop dwelling on what we've done and look toward what we need to do to repair the damage. Once there is income flowing then we can begin to see progress. Less homes will go into foreclosure, car loans won't be defaulted on, banks won't be stuck with housing assets they can't sell. Investors will be enclined to buy not sell.

Then the American economy will right itself because it is comprised of the brightest and best the world has to offer and we unlike any other nation have free will. We can listen to whom we want, evaluate all sides of an argument or even choose to go in our own direction. Stop the fear mongering!

Editorial Comment
Toms Tidbits