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Strategies & Market Trends : Scam Sniffing, Ball Busting Vigilantes -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (215)	2/5/2002 10:24:42 AM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 292

Ray, Yes, that article is somewhat correct. Probably the same managers and employees with the "Risk is THE Virtue" point of view are the ones now banding with the Reverend Jesse and hoping for a wealth transfer from your average citizen to replenish their 401Ks. However, one is free to have economic fundamentalism as a basic belief. Spend time at a homeless shelter as I do every year and you'll see what I see as you serve breakfast: these people are not in these straits because they aren't smart enough or good looking enough or white enough to make it in the world. Their poverty is based on a series of bad choices, which in themselves are almost always based on an absolute focus to NEVER delay gratification. Teen pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, early termination of education, property crime, and on and on. The pleasure of unrestrained sex, altered states and quick acquisition of consumer goods (theft), it's still the pleasure principle: sex, drugs and shoplifting/car boosting/ breaking & entering. And it's not just absolute poverty but relative poverty that works on this basis. Two brothers, 45 and 47, one is worth $2 million and the other is worth (netting out the car leases, mortgage balance, 401Ks, credit card balances) $150,000. Why? Simple, look at gratification delay capabilities. Brother A buys a decent used car for cash, Brother B (and his wife) have to have an Acura or a Lexus, necessitating leases. Brother A buys a fixer upper, fixers it upper, moves and rents it out. Brother B trades up to a bigger house and a jumbo mortgage before it's "time." Brother A and his wife drive to a favorite lakeside resort for vacation, Brother B and wife must be in Aspen for the snow and Cozumel for the sun. Cash flow gets pinched and wealth formation is delayed. Finally as to poor people remaining poor because of their unwillingness to take risks, like all creeds, there's some truth there. Imagine poor folks just off the boat in an inner city location who can't even speak English, but the ability to work hard. They start out working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for other immigrant families in the inner city, soon they have a stake to open their own business (98% debt financed by the seller, of course) at which they will now work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for the next 8 years. At the end of the 8 years they will have a 700K house in the burbs, sell their business to the next immigrant (98% debt financed) for $2 million and own two dry cleaning operations in the town next to their suburb (as well as a crummy little barbershop commercial building). Oh yes, and their kids will be at Harvard or Yale. Who are these people? Koreans doing the green grocer business in New York's Bronx, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Union City. Could the rest of the residents do this, or is the world against them? You figure it out. Is this a Korean fable? No, I knew a lot of them personally, have had dinner at their houses in Milburn and Tenafly, NJ, bought apples and oranges at their stores. America, still a great country (but, hey, you have to work). Kb