Here's my two cents and this is the best advice that you'll hear regarding this: people are way overextended on credit and that's caused this. Ever wonder how so and so can possibly afford what they're driving or living in? It's because they're nowhere near paying it off. Factor in credit for deadbeats/ bankrupcies--which are high interest loans--and they're finding out that they're not paying off hardly any principal. And bingo bango, that's why people are walking away from credit and loans and mortgages in record numbers.....because they've got nothing to lose, anyways. They have no collateral, no equity, and the banks and credit institutions are finding out how fun it is when you realize that your debts are worth more than your possessions, when you drive your car off the lot, and trying to sell used furniture and TV's and things like that.
Businesses like GM are hurting, because they banked on hiring and manufacturing like there was no tomorrow. Guess what? Tomorrow came. And they're seeing what is happening when they were banking on someone taking out their third car, when they can barely afford the first or second. I see people in the neighbourhood with a new car every year and I say, "my fucking god are you hung up on vanity. NONE of us in this neighborhood is anything past working class people".
Who gets squeezed? Us. The middle class, which is quickly disappearing. You only win if you're at the top or the bottom. If you're on social welfare, you never had anything to lose, because you were never putting anything into the economy anyways. If you're at the top, you're getting a corporate bailout. Even mid level businesses are feeling the sting....those that are worried about only taking out what they can pay off, they're finding out that they don't like the numbers anyways, so they're just walking away from it. The rest of us have to work hard days for our hard earned things, while we pay taxes and subsidize everyone that's going under that took a gamble or were overextended. For every working class Joe that only spends what they need to get by, there's someone flaunting the fact that they can take out extreme amounts of credit, and pretending to live better than they actually could. They're just one firing, one paycheque away from being out on the street. If you realized how many people are living just this close to the edge, you'd have realized just how truly screwed this economy was meant to be in the first place.
RRSP's took a tumble with high risk returns. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone pulled their investments out of banks, just like in the 1930's, to risk not losing all their money.
I blame the government, credit, and the average pretender, that needed huge fancy things they couldn't pay for, that helped to create the illusion that there was really that economy in the first place. In the old days, you had layaway--you slowly paid it off, then you got it. Nowadays, you have it right away, and then you're not happy with it because it's not 2008's car or whatever lame ass excuse for taking out more credit. I hope very much that the credit companies have a severe crackdown on people that can't and haven't paid off their credit, and take a good hard analysis of who they think WON'T be able to pay in the future. And all that overextended credit has left people without the ability to pay for hardly anything else, creating a nosedive in the rest of the sub economy.
That's not the end of it--mass automation and technological advances have put good citizens out of jobs. Quality decreased for quantity, and once that happened, people have their MP3's and cheap Asian imported sweatshop labour items and wonder where, something somehow, went wrong.
And then the government thinks dropping 8 bill into the LHC is a great idea or a non existent war. Excuse me? Have you fucking seen the homeless in your own streets? Have you seen the recession that is going on these days? Fix what you have before you start looking at vanity shit. Hell, no wonder the average person is so hung up on vanity, it's because the government that's created Nero's biggest fiddle to fuck around while Rome is burning.
It's with this sort of information and insight that I think I could do a hell of a lot better than most in office. But I don't care about the power, only about fixing the current problems and have no interest in politics. To me, you've gotta stop promising more jobs, because most of those jobs are lower paying, minimum wage ones. Be realistic. People are getting laid off left and right (I got laid off last year, even). This whole economy has to take a 360 degree turn and it's going to take a long time to reverse and it's not going to be a pretty sight. It's going to be to the point where people will have to find their own way and be self sustenant and where the term "survival of the fittest" will come in, because I speculate that with the (necessary) crackdown on credit, and the realization that alot of companies will have to lay off more and more people, that there will be a "do or die" mentality, by default. There just won't be the monetary resources for people looking "to make it" or live overly extravagantly without creating their own way, instead of being maxed out to the hilt on credit.