Where do you think the Federal Government got the zillion dollars they're pouring down the Wall Street rat hole? The same place they'll get the money to keep from having to adopt austere, even draconian, budget and policy measures: the printing presses are running overtime. I'm dead serious when I say that within a few years someone earning $60,000 a year will be saying "Would you like fries with that?"

Admittedly, I am no expert on economics, all I have to rely on is common sense concepts like you can't borrow your way to prosperity, and if you spend more than you earn you are heading for trouble. Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but it seems to me that the root cause of the current difficulty is that a large percentage of the wealth of this country, of the whole world, is/was illusory. People thought they were wealthy because they had $400,000 in assets safely tucked away with Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers thought they were wealthy because they had a hundred billion dollars worth of assets safely tucked away in real estate mortgages. The person who owed the mortgage payment thought he was wealthy because he knew that his assets were safely tucked away in his overvalued house (assessed at three, five, or even ten times its replacement cost) that would always continue to increase in "value", and he had money safely invested with Lehman Brothers, ad infinitum. Even the people with real money tucked safely away under their mattresses will turn out to be not so wealthy, because all they have is green paper whose value will prove to be illusory just as did the "wealth" managed by Lehman Brothers, although hopefully (yes, even I can muster small shreds of the H-Word) that value will not fall to the same degree.

What we are seeing now is a global reassessment of wealth based on actual value. Contrary to popular belief, "value" is a more complex concept than the simplistic idea that something is worth whatever someone else is willing to pay; it must also be considered in terms of its true cost. This applies to services as well as material goods.

I have always valued goods and services in terms of "...how many man hours did it take to produce it?", with the full understanding that many (most?) man-hours are intrinsically worth more than mine on the basis of education, training, and skill. I question, however, the idea that an hour of Michael Schumacher's (Formula One auto racer for the non-gearheads among us) time is worth 70,000 times as much as mine. I mean if he could drive 70,000 times faster than I, he would be approaching relativistic velocities! (Those are not a made-up numbers, I did the math.)

Anybody who thinks things will get better before they get a lot worse is in for a rude awakening.

tanstaafl. (aka "Cassandra")