Friday, December 5, 2008

IS THE GLASS OVERFLOWING?

I have suffered through two very depressing "recessions" in the 1970's and 1980's. They take a mental and a physical toll, but we learn to live through it.

Those of us who had parents that lived through the The Great Depression understand, and should remember when we didn't have school milk money or the fifteen-cent bus fare, we walked to school.

Now with easy credit vanishing it reinforced the adage, "there is no free lunch." The results: today's (Dec. 5, 2009) BLS Commissioner's statement, " . . . the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent in November, 1.7 percentage points above the December rate." But, also in that statement (http://www.bls.gov)are facts such as:
*Two-thirds of the recent job declines occurred in the service-providing sector as well as the gargantuan losses in industrial labor. However, there has been an increase in health care employment. Are we getting, not only older, but more stupid to the real world of economics?

Everything is relative. Mining is suspending strategic extraction, steel production is down, food prices increase, but fuel prices are on the decline. It's all supply and demand. Food and toilet paper are recession proof but auto's are not.

Then there are issues pointed out in today's chem.info (http://chem.info.com) that "U.S. Squandering Millions Due to Clumsy Project Management." Okay, we know we are wasteful. How many of us glut up at COSTCO only to waste half of the fresh products we purchased because we can't consume them before they go bad?

The same thing happens in industry -- world wide. We don't pay attention by organizing our thinking as well as our spending habits. We spend like drunks and then scratch our heads because we ran out of juice. I won't even talk about the AIG bailout without wanting to throw up.

So the solution: stop the flow, shore up the defences, financially and mentally. It doesn't take an MBA to figure this one out. Quit spending so much frivolously and own up to the fact that we can't be everything to everybody and every nation.

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