[quote=Rt.66][quote=CONCHO]Rt.66 I’m afraid you’re not going to change any minds here. This country is toast. The tent cities in my neighborhood grow by the day and now there are children in them (I’ve lived here 8 years and never seen that before). The people here will blame George Bush, they’ll blame Al Gore, they’ll blame Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals and illegal immigrants and hippies and anyone else they can think of, but they will never blame the man in the mirror… (A little shout out to our fallen homie MJ there. Hee heeeeee!)

We are heading straight to the bottom. The lifeboats left some time ago and only us numbskulls are left on the tilting deck, arguing about who’s stateroom is better and who got the best price on the ticket.[/quote]

Well said and wise words.

Your post would make a nice bookend for this thread.[/quote]

I don’t see it that way. I think temporary mass suffering might actually put us back on the right track over the long term. I don’t look forward to it…But what’s worse. The baby boomers and part of generation X to pay now or have our children pay our for our mistakes. I think the problem is folks want to get out of this mess to easily. They want to avoid pain, they want to avoid losing their job, they want to avoid seeing their home prices crater and having credit shrunken, or seeing their pensions get wiped out, or seeing their social security check halfed, medicare halved, welfare removed,etc That’s why there’s so much clamouring for government intervention. That’s why the government keeps spending and spending and spending and why CA can’t balance a damn budget. No one is willing to make sacrifices. Everyone wants to preserve their “quality of life”. Times are changing, and I think in order to move forward we need to bite the bullet and take on the pain, make sacrifices, not have these social entitlements.

I look at it this way. This u.s. auto industry is toast. And should this run it’s course, auto industry needs to produce less cars. People don’t need to be encouraged to spend more money they don’t have through subsidies. Enticing people to go buy more big ticket items at this point just encourages additional spending/consumerism that continues to drain american pockets. The goal of what auto companies OR any company for this matter is how to turn a buck overseas. That’s where the dollars are. That’s where we need to bring money back. That’s why I don’t get it when folks are pissed about the housing bailout but not ticked off about the auto bailout. Both encourage excessive domestic spending driven approaches which soon will be proven to leave american even poorer than before….my opinion.

It’s really time americans need to wake up. We’re poor, we’re broke.. The days of spend spend spend is over.