Getting the Boat Closer to Shore

When I lived in Denton, I had a board member whose grandfather once owned a bank in a small town in Kansas in the 1920’s. I asked him how his grandfather managed to keep his bank open when so many failed at the start of the depression. His grandfather said in the middle of the roaring twenties as people poured money into the stock market and thought happy days would never end, he decided that he better get his boat closer to shore. Our world much, as in the 1920’s, is built on consumption funded by debt not production of goods and services. We are encouraged to grab what we already have and throw it out in the backyard and go replace it with new stuff and put it on the buy now pay later plan. Debts in the Western World, especially government, are now so high the man in the moon can see them approaching. For example, a major industry is now called fast fashion where you wear something once and since it is no longer fashionable, throw it in the trash and get another. Our national debt is over 36 trillion and rising. The financial industry that gets its revenue from managing all this debt used to be around 8 percent of our GNP, and is now over 20 percent. In order to get one’s boat closer to shore in these times, you need to encourage your neighbor on both sides to keep borrowing and spending while you do the opposite. If everybody tries to tighten their belt at the same time, it will all collapse. As a Robert Frost poem says “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.