*a re-enactment of early pioneer days
We think of life as a mortgage note, a promissory note with an amount and a date, a place and time in the future when debts are all paid up and we can live our golden days without worries. Just sign, work hard, and see. You may not see the benefit of your hard work before you die, but your children will as they inherit the place free and clear and start their future with your help. A house will make their American dream come alive.
Our grandparents, with a life expectancy of fifty-sixty years managed to pay off their mortgages, raise five to eight children, and help the next generation become more stable and self reliant. Each dreamed that the next generation was to be more secure and better educated than the last.
About thirty years ago, in my generation, taxes for the wealthy were frozen by a series of deductions and shelters concocted so the wealthy had ways to hide their money, while the average Joe's salary and benefits began to shrink and costs for a gallon of milk, and car insurance jumped faster than the average raise. If your company had previously promised you a pension for the many years you worked, it began to find ways to renege on that promise by a variety of mergers, negotiations, or declaring insolvency.
Wall Street managed to screw up the American economy and took State and Municipalities' accounts into the same vortex as savings held in stocks and bonds and bank notes by ordinary citizens.
When Wall Street collapsed, the economy collapsed. None of the individual investors recouped their losses. Companies liquidated. If you anticipated a pension, chances are your company was no longer able to deliver one. So many regulatory standards had been ignored; and policies to re-intestate strong safeguards came under attack. Somehow, in our naivete' we thought, for sure, that having a lot of regulations meant we were not going to get a good return on our investments.
So where are we today? There are still many of us who are in the dark about how the recession occurred and who is to blame for it. There are still many who feel regulations are bad for our economy. There are still many who want no government at all.
I only know one thing for sure: our American dream has collapsed.
Why are we not talking about that?
