When my mother made tuna fish casserole for dinner three nights a week and on the other nights we had macaroni and cheese, that is when we know things were different. I am sure if you think back you had indicators like that, but we didn’t know they were indicators. We just thought mom decided to change our eating habits.
There are things like that today. Recently I read that you can tell when the economy is not doing well by measuring the trash we generate. Yes, now there are those that are monitoring our waste dumps. Believe it or not they look at what is thrown away before it goes through recycling. I can just see it group of economist at our large waste dumps counting the tons of waste being put in them. By the way Pennsylvania is the leading state for landfills. That is because they have real wasteful neighbors, New York and New Jersey.
How about watching the US Post Office? They are losing money because people are not using them enough. Partly do to new technology and partly because the economy is not as robust as it was two years.
What I am saying you don’t need to be economist to know that the economy is not in good shape, just ask those that are looking for work. Do we need other indicators? Will I’ll give another one, the number of cars that go to the junk yard; normally we scrap about 14.5 million cars a year, but last year we scraped less that 9 million. Or look at housing starts. At present we are about 5.5 million starts, but we need about 14 million new houses a year to keep up with demand.
Are you starting to see something? Some day we are going to have to catch up on the cars or we’ll look like Cuba with a bunch of old cars and I don’t think that will happen. Also our population is growing and will continue to grow of the next 30 years, so we are going to have more new home.
Could these things be the engine that propels us out of this mess, could be? I am sure of one thing that well get this country going again and it is good old American ingenuity. And I am sticking to that premise.
Happiness with Wealth to you
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