Editor, Times-Union: Yesterday the figures came out that showed the U.S unemployment rate was somewhere around 9.2 percent. The president and the congress, along with the rest of our representatives, are scratching their thick heads asking how and why this is?
Well, guys and gals, let me let you in on a little secret that has evaded you up until now. Spending equals jobs ... OK ... yeah ... duh... Everybody knows that. How is that a big secret?
This country runs on credit, it has become that way ever since the late ’70s, early ’80s, if not sooner. Most people have credit cards and they live on the flow they provide in their lives.
After 2009 when we bailed out the banks, the very banks that loaned money to people that they should not have. Those banks, with no control from our government, raised rates on all borrowers to very unreasonable rates. In no time people could not afford to borrow, that is if the banks were even willing to loan to them any more. The current rate of return on a saving account is a dismal 1.12 percent on a simple savings account. Pardon me if I’m off by a few points. I think everybody gets my point. The new rate from Citi Cards is at 21.9 percent for people with perfect credit. As a result, we all stopped spending money on things we don’t need like food and cars to get to work.
On top of that we all want everything cheaper and China has obliged us by hiring kids at what would be equal to around a $1 US. So we don’t build much anymore and there is no need to hire us to put things on the market.
On a personal note, as an example of how messed up things are, I was booking a flight the other day for my wife to Calif. As I was booking it on American Airlines, up pops a Citi card offer to save $50 on the flight if we applied for their card. I quickly jumped at the offer because, like everyone else, we feel the crunch on our economy. They declined us because we had some new cards. Now here’s the kicker ... I needed some new cloths, so we went out to get them. Every store we went to said if we got their card we would save 10 percent right now. Again, why not save the money? Even though we paid all the cards off when the bill came in, Citi Cards said, “Well, you might run out and load them all up and not pay us back.” Also, whenever you apply for a new card your credit rate goes down. Ahhh! Congress pass some laws so that interest rates can’t be higher than 10 percent above the prime. Also, tax incoming products to make it more reasonable to build it here. Sooner or later we are gonna have to pay all those trillions of dollars back and I prefer sooner.
