personal stuff

Other than talk about games and the initial post of personal views way back in the day, I haven't really said anything about me as a person. And what a fun situation I'm in. So here goes.

I had bought a new car in 2004 after I attained a managerial job for a retail company- this becomes significant later. More recently, I was unemployed for about 2 years after being let go from a different retail company as a store manager. I lived in an area without much industry at all- the area has a company that produces RVs and mobile homes, but that's about it- and the vast majority of everything else in the area was service sector. In the economy we had 2 years ago, that means the job market in the area was nonexistent. I looked and looked and looked, and the only positions I was able to find available were part time, minimum wage jobs. Doing the math, I needed to find a company that paid almost $12 an hour on a full time basis to simply equal what I was getting on unemployment, so I wasn't about to take a pay cut when I already had a hard time making ends meet, paying for my car payment, insurance, rent, etc etc.

Towards the end of those two years (the beginning of this year) I had fallen very behind on everything. My car was up for repossession, my registration was very expired and I had 3 parking tickets because of it. So if the repo squad didn't nab it, the police were about to. I'm piggybacking on a friend's cell phone plan, or the internet would be my only means of contacting the outside world. In short, my world was a shambles and hanging by a thread, on the edge of crumbling to ashes.

I finally took a job- it was minimum wage like all the rest of them, but it was full time, so it was at least something. I fell even further behind after accepting "gainful" employment, since I was making less money than I was getting even on unemployment. I worked it for a couple months, all the while fearing for my vehicle, double threatened by the legal owners of the car and by law enforcement just doing their job. My car was/is everything; without it, I lose my job because there are no other options to travel to work- cabs too expensive, much too far to walk or ride a bicycle, and the labyrinthine schedule and routes of buses in three or four different cities would not get the job done. And if I lose my job, I might as well go commit a crime that will put me in jail so I can have a roof over my head and not go hungry, and then receive all sorts of benefits given to convicts after they get out of prison- such as job training and placement assistance.

Things started to look up in June when I moved away from the tiny little hell hole of a desert town I was in to a place much closer to the coast- moved in with an old high school friend of mine who not only needed a roommate to help pay rent, but his company had positions they needed filled. And it paid better than minimum wage. Not much better, but anything helps. So in a time span of about two weeks I interviewed for the new position and was hired, and moved down there. It happened so fast, I worked the last night at my old job on a Sunday night (technically Monday morning, as the shift lasted until 12:30AM) and started training with my new company Monday morning at 9AM, with the final load of my belongings in the back of my car.

With the increase in pay from the new job from June to now, my car is no longer up for repossession, though I am again a month behind on the payment. I still owe the Department of Motor Vehicles for my registration, to include three times the value of the three parking tickets that were issued to me because I did not update my registration in a 30 day period from time of issuance of the ticket. My car will still likely be towed by the police if I get pulled over or leave it parked in a public area, and I will then, again, be helpless to prevent the destruction of my life due to not having a vehicle to drive to my work to earn income.

And don't tell me "just pay the ticket and get your car back", because that is not the way it works. I'll have to pay off all the tickets just to be able to update my registration, and then pay for the late registration, and then pay a fine to the law enforcement agency for their "troubles" in calling a company to tow my car away, and then, on top of all of that, I'll have the opportunity to pay the towing company a $200+ per day storage fee to have them release my car to me.

With less than $70 in my bank account, with all my money flying away from me faster than I can earn it just to pay off my debts, getting my car back after it gets towed will not happen.

To put icing on the cake, my car developed a wiring problem where my brake lights will not turn on when I depress the pedal. I still work until after sunset, so my lack of brake lights is readily apparent on my drive home from work. Its like having a giant, bright (dim?) sign for the entire local police force affixed to my car.

Thats my financial life as it stands right now.

Things could always be worse, I know, but it makes your life seem a little brighter by hearing about mine, doesn't it? :)

This Broken Bailout of Ours

Hallelujah!

Voted down, and a damn good thing too. This is a prime example for the reason why I picked the name I did for my blog.

Here's the root of the problem. Bad economic decisions in our modern banking industry (I refuse to call them "institutions" like the media seems to love doing - they are not "institutions" that we must simply keep afloat. They're businesses.) stretch back to at least the 1970's where the savings & loans started to go under. Laws passed in 1980 apparently made it acceptable for them to be increasingly loose with their money, and in the following decade we had a savings & loan meltdown. Lets notice the trend starting here: government got involved in business, and the market failed. In 1989, the government formed the Resolution Trust Corporation to help these companies get rid of their "toxic" investments, and a significant portion of this was funded with taxpayer dollars. Notice anything similar about what's happening today?

So the real meat of the problem here is that these companies feel safer since the door has been thrown wide open for government bailouts of bad financial decisions. The very same people who made these bad decisions are screaming for the bailout to happen, to avoid an economic "meltdown". Yeah, sure, let's bail you out so you can run away with your golden parachute. The man who took over as CEO for WaMu recently worked a whole 17 days before the company failed, and he received a $20 million payment. Let's not forget Stanley O'Neal, the former Merill Lynch CEO until 2007, left with $161 million.

The logic simply fails. These companies, whose business it was to loan money and make money on those investments, failed. They made bad investments, and now they're in financial trouble. The argument for the bailout is that the people of this country and their businesses won't be able to get home loans, car loans, student loans, business loans, because the institutions that loan money don't know how much they can loan. . . So we need to give them taxpayer money so that they can loan more money. They're in trouble because they made bad decisions about loaning money; we don't need to give them money from taxpayers so that they can continue their failing business.

Despite modern indications, we live in a Capitalist society, folks. The government is attempting to apply a Socialist solution to a Capitalist system.

Here's a hint: the free market fixes itself, and when the government gets involved in business, bad things happen.

Let me paint for you the true Capitalist, free-market scenario. These financial businesses fail (in part, at least, because of underhanded lending techniques. That's a totally separate matter). They get picked apart by the other companies who want to create or expand their financial influence. The assets of the failed companies get bought by people looking to make money on their failure to do so. If the government steps in at all, it should be to reduce or eliminate taxes on the income made from these "dangerous" investments to increase the speed that these assets get bought.

Not all of it is a bright, sunshiney picture. The stock market takes a dip, because some of its pillars have crumbled, but the pillars are being remade even as they crumble. The people who made silly purchases of homes or cars or what have you... I'm sorry, but have a little personal responsibility for your actions. You either didn't read the fine print on your loan contracts, or you didn't understand it. So, these people are in trouble. If the company that buys their bad loan has a good heart, they can restructure the loan to have a more sane interest rate, and probably decrease the overall amount owed, in order to keep these debtors in their car/home whatever they bought, and attempt to have a positive cash flow from the original people who made the loan. Failing that, or if the company is a little more cut throat, they'll evict the person or repossess the property, and attempt to sell it to someone else to recoup the money on their investment on these "bad" loans.

In the end, some people lose their property due to making a bad decision about which company and what loan, some people get a break and get to keep it... Some companies go under, some companies get bigger. The market and the economy has a little healthy turmoil, and then things normalize and stabilize. And we go back to living life, just like we always have.

... I seem to have run out of words. In closing, the government should get its big nose out of the market and the market will take care of itself. In the future, the people of this great nation and the businesses in it will be a lot more careful how they treat loans. We go through a short time of economnic difficulty, and then things normalize. The free market system works - you just have to leave it alone and let it. It has for the past 200 years, with various government induced hiccups.