Have We Stopped Moving Forward?

     Have we stopped moving forward? Yes I think we have. When we started to move to a service economy in the eighties we slowed down quite a bit. In the early eighties the interest rates for loans were sky high. A consumer loan for someone with good credit was around 18%. The other side of the coin is that savings and investment rates were very high too.

     Let's say you have a small old family business. It has been profitable for say fifty years. You as an owner of the business are second or third generation. You have a load in the bank. Let's just say it is a furniture business. The furniture you produce costs a lot of money. Inflation has been high. So you pay your workers more than ever before. The older workers are getting old, retiring or dying off. The Baby Boomers (read my generation) are filling the ranks. We just don't work as hard as the previous generation (read Great Depression and World War Two people). We want more money. There is new technology we are interested in and want more money to buy it. If we get hurt on the job we will sue you. We are more likely to miss work. We were basically spoiled by our parents and grand parents who worked so hard and tried to make sure we did not have to go through what they did. So as a small business owner it was to their advantage to just close the business and make more then they netted off investments. Hence a bad economy. 

     So they drop the interest rate. Make credit easy. People take jobs and make things. We make things that other countries  want. So we sell them something. Now for the most part the children of my age are coming of age. At this juncture they can be at least thirty years old. They are so used to all the nice things. They will only do the very minimum. But they want. 

     We were solidly into telephones. You now the ones on the wall. I am totally cellular. As most people are now. Why fool with a home phone or pay phone. Pay phones are almost dead. I used to use them quite a bit.
     The bottom line is as a nation we are not as sharp as we used to be. High schools weren't merely a place to hang out until you quit or graduated. High schools actually were a place where you learned something. Perhaps to go to a job or go on to college. Now high school is just a place where you sit through and move on. If of course you choose to graduate.
     We as a nation have to change our mentality. Work hard and behave. Do not bother other people. Be nice.