The Summer of Our Floundering

I hear that our National leaders want to celebrate the economy this summer. Unlike them, I am struggling to build up my business in an environment where potential clients keep putting off work.

While we can never know where we would have ended up, if we had taken another path, it is clear that this country is currently stumbling down a path of diminishing returns.

It is impossible to get the results you seek, when your path undermines the structures and stores needed to get the results. The structure I am refering to in this case, are those structures which create income and profits -and- the stores I refer to are the accumulated assets financial and otherwise created in the past.

Like a farmer in a famine, we are now eating our our future.

Some seeds, such as beans and corn are also food. If you need to produce more food, you must plant more seed. The seed for eating and the seed for planting are finite in their total amount. Seed can only be used for one purpose or the other. If you eat it, it is not available for planting.

If you fail to produce enough food you have a problem that can be solved in one of three ways: 1. Go Hungry, 2. Eat some of your planting seed (needed for the next season), 3. Obtain food from someone who has excess and repay them in the future.

We now have endured an economy that has stumbled since 2008. While many individuals and businesses have had to go "hungry" out of neccesity, both the federal and many state governments thus far have primarily borrowed from outside and played financial games that are eating some of next year's planting seed.

The dynamic at play is dangerous. When a poor nation gets into a real famine, millions of people die and most of the planting seed is consumed. Famine qucikly becomes a downward reinforcing cycle, as each season's crop is deprived the proper planting seed needed. Even with outside help, it takes decades to restore a self-sustaining internal balance.

It is clear that collective government spending, plus the debt and taxes driven by it, are in fact hampering the ability of individuals and businesses to grow and profit. Both governmental consumption and governmental promises are undermining the structures needed to pay for those promises.

To see our future we need merely to look at Greece. The European Union has had to face the limitations of its ambitions as the Greek government has failed financially. The Greek government's policies and promises to the poor, labor unions and governmental class of the population have begun to go unfilled. The Greek economy simply could not produce the income to support the mushrooming cost of its promises. The Greeks ran out of gimics and one-time measures to balance their budgets and pay their bills -and- at the same time they ran out of credit with their creditors. Since they are tied to the Euro, they could not escape their obligations by devaluing their currency. They needed to go to Brussels for a bail-out.

They are rioting in the streets in Athens on a regular basis. Move forward a few years, and replace, Greece with California, the Euro with the dollar and Brussels with Washington. It appears to be our shared path without drastic reform and restraint.