IS 2009 GOING TO BE THE YEAR ALL BETS ARE OFF?

   So much has happened in the waning months of 2008 one wonders could it get any worse – lets hope not. Other than when I joined the Navy and ended up sixty miles off the coast of Japan in the Third Fleet I can’t think of a worst time in my life, how about you? We were told time and again that we will mend our fences throughout the world to make people love us again. I don’t know about you but in my 87+ years I have never worried about how other countries loved us because they most always have a reason, good or bad, not to love us. No matter how things end up in the world, in the end it will be the good ole USA that will be expected to save most of the countries of the world when they get into trouble. I give you both World War I and World War II where we had to do it and in neither instance were we the perpetrators of the mess our so called friends in Europe got into. I hope we will keep that in mind in the next dozen or so years. It might be good for a change if we just stay home, rebuild our military, stop the crazy spending and get ourselves back on our feet where we do remain the leader of the world’s greatest democracy. From past experience that does go back to the Roosevelt era I remember the bad times and the good times and can tell you that in either case our government has been a failure in trying to manage our economy. We are built on the premise that hard work, entrepreneurship and a little good luck will pull us out of bad times. We seem to know it better than any other country in the world and I hope this bit of a slow down of our economy will work itself out of trouble the old fashioned way, by hard work on every ones part. I am very fearful of the free for all manufacturing of the green-back will lead us into inflation like none of us have seen even including under the Cotton Growers presidency when inflation was double digit and federal treasuries were as much as 18% if I remember it correctly. Once we start spending it like there’s no tomorrow who will know when to put the brakes on, no one I fear. The housing boom that went bust may not be the worst thing that happened if it teaches us a lesson that honesty is still the best policy as corny as it may sound. Everyone that got into a home with no dollars down and the appraiser jacked up the price an extra $20 grand in order that people with no money could get a loan and who cares what the interest rate was as long as they got into the house. And does anyone ever remember anyplace in our Constitution where it says everyone is guaranteed a home of their own, new furniture, new car and new babies all at the same time with no hope of paying any of it off in fifty years let alone thirty years? For years many of us have feared we were in for a bust at the rate we were growing here in Las Vegas, the land of the not so great paying jobs but lots of opportunity to refinance once you got into debt up to your neck. I don’t know what is going to happen in the next dozen years but hope and pray the man above can help those in power have some wisdom to restrain us from bankrupting our country. I wish you all a very happy New Year urge you to keep the faith. It isn’t as bad as we think if we keep our cool.

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