Athens: A tragedy soon coming to America

March 15, 2012

Athens: A tragedy of epic proportions!

The economy has completely melted down. Almost everyone has been harmed. Many family's personal savings are gone. Government safety nets have dried up. Few new jobs in sight for the foreseeable future. All government services have been massively reduced due to funding shortages. The wealthiest have either fled the country or are behind walls with private security for protection. Formerly middle class citizens have been forced to combine with other family members or friends in order to conserve dwindling resources. Many of the even less fortunate now face the reality of being homeless or living in charitable shelters. In one family the heads of the household are a couple in their late fifties who have been married since their teenage years. They have two sons who are 33 and 35. Both sons live at home and, without adequate education, will likely remain there because they have no hope of finding any meaningful work. Like most of their friends they know they cannot afford to even consider getting married or having children. In addition to the immediate family, the father's mother, the wife's father, two uncles, another aunt, and three adult nieces and nephews live in their small home. They have a garden and a few chickens to supplement their diet. They are forced to rely on a thriving black market and bartering with their neighbors whenever possible to obtain most necessities.

The husband and wife recently were interviewed by a news reporter to see how this former middle class family was dealing with the challenges they are facing. He had been employed for over 30 years as an engineer with a local government run water utility company. She had worked for many years as a secretary for a small law office, but had been let go a few years ago and was unable to find another job. He had been planning to retire at age 60 with a pension which, along with their savings, would have allowed him and his wife to have a reasonable retirement. They had planned to spend some of their retirement years traveling and visiting their two sons and their expected grandchildren. None of these life-long dreams is even remotely possible in their new reality. Even when he was forced into early retirement with a partial pension three years ago, they still expected to survive with just a few sacrifices. However, a year later the pension fund went broke. His wife then developed breast cancer. Fortunately it was caught early, but they were forced to liquidate much of their savings to help pay for needed treatments. The entire family now struggles just to keep their small home heated and food on the table.

The interviewer asked the husband who he blamed for the situation that their family faces today? The husband took quite a while to answer. He then said; “Well it is easy to point all the blame at our elected leaders, because it is easy to see that they have failed for decades to take the necessary actions that they should have. They must have seen that the continued deficit spending, the growing national debt, and the promised future entitlements could never have been considered sustainable. Instead our leaders just kept doing business as usual and, for them, staying in power was more important than confronting the truth about our nation's condition.” His wife was asked if she too blamed the politicians for all of the problems. She turned to his mother and her father, and said; “I hate to say this, but I mostly blame my own and even my parent's generations for our failure to stand up and fight for needed changes. We all saw an accumulation of debt that we knew could never be sustained. However, none of us wanted to even think about changes that would cause us to have to make immediate personal sacrifices. Instead, we kept thinking and hoping that our leaders would find other expenses to cut and new sources of revenues. We kept listening to our favored party's promises, and re-electing the same politicians to represent our best interests. Even today our parties remain at war with each other. They continue to blame those in the other party for where we are today, but neither party offers any realistic solutions. Meanwhile, the vast majority of our citizens are suffering just like our family. And what's truly terrifying is that conditions will likely only get worse in the future.” “

The family in this story is not named Papadopoulus and they do not live in Greece. Instead they are the Millers, or the Adams, or the Smiths, or just about any other name, and they live in America in places like Athens, Georgia in 20??. While the above story is fictitious, many families like this are suffering this way in Greece today. My question is; when will we and our leaders decide to learn from their tragedy and do what is needed to prevent our own version of the Greek tragedy? Sadly, I'm afraid that too many of us here will sit back and just hope. Like there, we will just continue to re-elect the same folks who have repeatedly shown their inability to confront our many serious problems. Like there, failure is inevitable. Like this fictitious Greek story...our successors will be left to wonder why earlier generations failed to have the courage to act.

These are my opinions. What do you think?

Mike Tower

Hendersonville, NC


Please visit: 

Lee's Political Opinion
leespoliticalopinion.blogspot.com

Citizens Against Politics As Usual
http://capau.org

Gasoline: It's all about supply/demand

April 8, 2012

Gasoline prices reality

I read in the paper on Monday that gas prices are expected to soon top $4 in North Carolina. The prices of gasoline have almost doubled since Mr. Obama was elected, and his opponents have vilified him mightily for his actions or inactions. Then Newt Gingrich comes along with his promise to lower the price down to $2.50 per gallon if he were to be elected. He must know some magic that nobody else remotely connected to gasoline economics understands. I guess it's just one more example of why the nominating races are sometimes referred to as the silly season. Seriously now, If Mr. Obama wants to be re-elected as badly as we all think he does...don't you think that he would do whatever is possible and necessary to reduce the prices at the pump...if he could? Besides Mr. Gingrich'd ludicrous and laughable ideas, have you heard one rational proposal to solve the problem? Yes we can increase drilling, and we can allow the Keystone pipeline to move forward...but neither will add significantly to the world's oil supply any time soon. The really harsh truth is that oil is simply a global commodity whose prices are, like any other, controlled by the laws of supply and demand...and demand is and will continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future.

One only has to go back to the collapse of the USSR and China's leadership's decision to re-engineer their economy into a quasi form of capitalism to see the seeds being planted that were destined to change our way of life forever. For the many decades since WW II America has been the unquestioned global economic leader. We produced and consumed far more per capita than any other country. Gasoline is just one of the global commodities that we have been over-consuming for decades...because we could! We developed an amazing Interstate Highway system under the leadership of President Eisenhower. We built bigger and thirstier cars because low gas prices allowed us to do so. We backed off for a short time in the 1970's when supplies were bottlenecked by the middle east suppliers. However, the minute the spigot reopened we went right back to gas guzzlers. After all, who doesn't want a powerful car, a full-size pickup, or SUV? We valued faster, roomier vehicles more than gas economy. Today we remain, with less than 5% of the worlds population, consuming almost a quarter of the worlds oil. What is really putting the economic damper on our ability to continue to buy gasoline at cheaper prices is that global demand led by the rapidly expanding consumerism in developing countries like India, China, and even Eastern Europe are adding hundreds of millions of consumers also demanding cars and the gasoline to fuel them. No matter how much we don't like the price at the pump going up...in the short term we simply can't reverse the economic laws of supply and demand. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we can't do much about it in the long term either because by the time any actions we might take to increase production on-shore...global demand will have increased to even higher levels which will only serve to drive prices steadily higher.

Our only reasonable and sustainable action will be for most consumers here to buy smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, just as consumers in most of the rest of the world's developed countries have always done due to higher gas prices driven by much higher taxes on gasoline. That won't be an easy action for us to take because, as usual, we have all gotten use to expecting stable gas prices...and we don't like change. However, as prices continue to rise, we will have no other choice. In the past every single time gas prices spiked some consumers rushed to buy more fuel efficient cars...and that appears to be happening again. Then as soon as prices reversed a bit...we went right back to the bigger vehicles we are so used to driving. However, it appears highly unlikely that prices will ever actually return to much lower levels than today for very long. Prices most likely will continue to increase as global demand continues to explosively grow. You also have to remember that many other consumer goods, and even food, costs and retail prices are also heavily impacted by oil prices. No action by any politician will be able to reverse this global economic reality. It is a shame that we again failed to have the needed leadership in Washington for the past few decades that night have allowed us to gradually adjust to our new reality in this particular area. However, as we have always seen, getting re-elected comes far ahead of politicians doing what is actually needed for our best long term interests. They won't confront the entitlements and they haven't confronted our over-consumption of gasoline...because they are fearful we might actually wake up and do something about it...like vote them out. I can't imagine where they ever got that idea.

As usual, these are my opinions. What do you think?

Mike Tower

Hendersonville, NC

Please visit:

Lee's Political Opinion
leespoliticalopinion.blogspot.com

Citizens Against Politics As Usual
http://capau.org