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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TH who wrote (96617)	8/25/2008 3:56:47 PM
From: inchingup	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

"Did Walker have any ideas where the 2 Trillion went?" Nope, all he said is that is was unaccounted for. I believe the actual figure was either 2.4 or 2.6... "Everyone seems to grasp the potential devastation of global warming with pictures of disappearing glaciers and stranded polar bears, but getting them to comprehend 13 and 50+ trillion is like trying to get to JSix to calculate the drive time by Pinto to Alpha Centauri." That was the basic point of the film. Go one and one and stuff it down your friends and neighbors throats. It truly is amazing that he goes city to city meeting with might amount to a 100 or less people per gathering (estimated by one of the clips shown of a town hall meeting, not necessarily precise) to get the message out. I have been trying to do the same for years. I have 2 friends around 60 years old who own business's that are now basically bankrupt due to reduced government expenditures that they relied on to keep themselves solvent. One is a staunch Democrat and the other a Republican. The Republican friend has a scooter business that catered to the handicapped. (Small scooters for in home use) His sales over the past 10 years have decreased by a margin of 80% due to decreased government funding. He now spends his days listening to Limbaugh on the radio and hoping someone calls him to do a repair. He keeps claiming his problems were caused by "the economy" while refusing to acknowledge the cause of the economic downturn. I may as well talk to a rock. A second friend owns a wheelchair taxi business and transports people from their home, nursing home, or other place of residence to and from medical appointments. He has owned the business for 10 years and has not received one additional penny of reimbursement per passenger since its inception. Fuel prices have literally killed his business. Last evening we sat around a fire pit for 6 hours discussing probable ways to keep it solvent and finally concluded that wasn't happening. Luckily for him if he shuts down he will only be about 10K in the red and he does have some other income. He is a willing listener and understands exactly what is happening in regards to the economy. Despite this, he wants to open a restaurant and has wanted to do so for years. He would have to borrow a minimum of $25K on a credit card and average sales of about $350-500 per day just to break even. And the featured item on his menu....hot dogs! We calculated that his first year expenses, minus food costs would be between $80-100K. 100% of that money would be at risk and if/when the restaurant failed he would likely have to sell his home and other items to pay off the debt. Long story made short. His second option is to bring another adult into his home whom he could supervise. He already has one and nets about $4K per month and a second one would net him about another $2K. He has plenty of room to accommodate that individual. However, after a long discussion he felt it would cause him too much stress to add another client. This is a person who is so stressed out now over his failing business that he has lost all rationality. So despite all the economic hazards ahead of which he is well aware, he believes that he can beat the system by opening one of the highest rate of failure business's ever conceived. Were it not for a couple of soothing brews while sitting around the fire, the evening would have been a complete waste of time.