Let's Help Our Economy

Well, according to all reports, Americans are doing something they should have been doing for many years and weren’t, actually saving money. Imagine that. It took the economy crashing and burning to make people realize that it’s a good idea to have some reserve cash on hand and not run your budget like the government does, by continuously running itself into debt. (Now if we could only get the idiots running the government to realize that basic fact…)

While it’s a laudable tenet, it couldn’t happen at a worse time for our economy. As people hoard money and pay off debt, they quit spending on anything other than necessities. This hurts companies that thrive on people buying their goods and services, which causes them to lay people off, or worse, go out of business altogether. This gets reported in the news in the form of statistics and polls and brought to us as a daily dose of bad news for our economy. People hoard even more because of all that bad news and it ends up being a downward spiral.

You know what our economy needs? People spending money! Yes, the banks need to open up the credit market and start lending money for car and home purchases (to qualified buyers of course) but the American people could do more for the economy than any government bailout just by opening up the purse strings a little. Then maybe the daily reports wouldn’t be so bad and people would feel a little better and spend even more and pretty soon companies would start rehiring and guess what, our economy is growing again.

It would be a slow process and so it should be. Quick, forced, artificial economic fixes only serve to do more harm than good in the long run. Another fact our “brilliant” leaders don’t seem to grasp. They seem to think the best thing to do is tinker with a free economy. Well, that’s what screwed it up in the first place!

We, the American people can fix this problem. Just open up that wallet now and then and buy something. That would do more than you realize. I intend to. I’m going to start buying, not going in debt, but buying things I need with cash I have on hand, otherwise known as discretionary income. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll buy a new laser printer today. I’ve been wanting one of those for a while now. Time to buy it. Might even buy a new TV to take care of that pesky switchover to digital TV… and I’ve been looking at those new Chevy hybrid pickups too… hmmm….