Let's Face Our Problems! Americans are Ready.  

HERE’S ANOTHER’S BIG PICTURE VIEW.  A longtime regular reader emailed me his opinion of the current US residential housing market yesterday and how the government is handling things, writing:

‘It seems now to me that the "gov" is tweaking things to "hold it off."  By that I mean that if you allow phony mortgages for years and pump up the price of homes, when that collapses home values must drop to the "normal" level.  Pushing this pain off to the future only makes it more protracted and worse.  I see a worse "bear" than you.’

I answered this way, with a couple of tweaks myself for today’s broader readership: .

“I agree.  The way our political system and US government is currently put together it's always in the politicians own best interest to put off resolving trouble.  Thus they never face trouble head on.  Economists see this and note it as it occurs (like in the current housing crisis) but nothing every changes.  Re: the current housing debacle, all the effort, like you say, has been to postpone trouble.  Which means we can't get through it, it will linger & linger. 

“Obama's plan is to put on all Congressional deliberations and votes on public TV so the public can watch what goes on and who votes for what.  Hopefully that may change things and we can move from a representative democracy to a participatory democracy whereby the public gets a vote on all large issues.  Therefore we get back to more equitable representation for all.

“Even business is fed up with the current lobbying system.  It costs business a fortune!  They now need to fund a large, extraneous lobbying budget.  So business wants to end the whole lobbying system but can't while their competition keeps on lobbying.  Just like business wants a cap & trade emissions scheme and other regulations.  If our, or all, governments were to just say here's the new rules, no lobbying in Washington, or over in the pollution emission area, here’s the rules on how to operate going forward, these rules would apply to all business so all could see that no one would get an advantage.  We do desperately need new, enlightened leadership!"

Schwartz View:  It’s just like those suggesting we explore for more oil and open up more protected lands.  We’re still heading in totally the wrong direction with wrongheaded thinking completely.  We all just need to get a brand new mindset that we’re not using any more oil, let’s have America lead the way in getting off burning oil (and coal).  Thanks goodness for one well known investor doing some out-of -the-box thinking, the long time oil man, Boone Pickens!  Go Boone!  I’m 100% behind The Pickens Plan,  unveiled earlier this week.  If you haven’t heard of it or you missed my Wednesday review and raves about it in this space, please let me know and I’ll email you some info.  Or just google it and read about it yourselves.  Briefly it calls for putting up wind turbines in the wind corridor from Canada down to Texas and using that energy to replace natural gas usage and start using that natural gas to power cars.  I love it!  And I’m all for any other similar plans anyone else comes up as well.  America generally wakes up and responds only where there is a crisis.  Let’s get America working as a team toward the right goal!