Reply #15: I have posted here numerous times about what to do next [View All]

[TwixVoy]

The fact is credit is going to be widely harder to come by over the next several years... more so than people can even imagine right now. Unfortunately many people have gotten in to the positions of substituting low wages with credit.

Once that is no longer possible it won't be the end of the world, but it WILL lead to a drastic change in life style. We will be a poor nation. The middle class is going to get even smaller - drastically smaller I'm afraid. We no longer produce anything in this country anymore, and what we do produce is going to hell (i.e. cars).

We built up our entire economy on consumption - and consumption based on DEBT no less.

I work for a major national retailer. Do you know what we have been told from corporate for YEARS? "Push the credit card on the customer. Our research shows they will spend X percentage more with the credit card" Basically our entire "growth" as an economy has been fake. It has been based on "growth" because more and more credit became available.

Now that credit is drying up and we are going to see ZERO REAL growth in the economy. In fact we are going to see massive negative growth. This means job creation, for example, will be damn difficult.

So what to do now? Frankly, what we should have been doing 20 years ago. PAY OFF DEBT. Stop spending on credit. Stop shipping our production jobs out of the country. (too late on this one sadly) Cut back in ways no one wants to do - but they are going to have to. We are going to live poor. We lived on credit for far too long and now the time to pay up has come. A LOT of people are in denial about this, but it will be life for most of us for likely the next 15-20 years. We will be a poor country.