This morning I took my son to school where everyone wore a smile on their collective faces. The first real warm day and promise of a few more to follow helps brighten the mood for this mid-west city. The winter brought more than cold temperatures and less than novel snow patches. The recession, the economy, the housing market, everything seemed to make this winter especially hard for most. With a season of downtrodden heavy hearts and despairing thoughts of what might come next we find respite in things like stimulus packages that may or may not have their intended effect and that very basic of human needs, warmer weather as we look towards the next few months.
I walked in the door from my daily ritual of parking lots and hallways of hopes and dreams called our educational system. It starts my mind racing. I get my obligatory 2nd cup of coffee brewed from the fine marketing franchise who landed a deal with Costco to give us way too much in bulk. We are well stocked for our newly acquired nervous coffee drinking habits. I read the first headline on my homepage since its free and the actual paper is just out of date and immediately I am interested in the unemployment report. 3.6 Million jobs lost thus far, holy smokes. In my deep contemplative processing what that means to 
each one of those millions of people my coffee turns a bit sour. My eye catches the credit card strategically placed so I remember to cancel it in my attempt to stay on top of the real currency these days, creditworthiness. I pick up the phone and dial in a pace that is now two months over due. Open credit lines is not the worst thing in the world since they are a “safety net” of sorts, but safety nets should not charge you criminal rates for saving you, that’s the job of our Health Care System.
On the other side of the phone was an obvious foreign voice in a chipper disposition. I had to squint my eyes and strain my ears to really concentrate on what words are actually coming out of this person’s mouth. Like he was coached and to the script the very nice gentleman informed me his name was “Archie”. For one I haven’t heard that name since there were “rumbles”, car clubs with white t-shirts tucked into tight jeans and good morals on television. The chance that this guy’s name was actually Archie made me laugh and almost lose the before-mentioned sour tasting coffee.
I started making connections as I hung up the phone. Like a movie montage the images in my mind fit together so disappointingly perfect. A colleague suggested to me that the price of gas a few years ago is the real reason we are in trouble. The regulators raise the price to bleed us when there was available money in the economy, and by available I mean money in loans like giant credit cards that allowed consumers to borrow against an asset that had peaked in value in what appeared to be a cyclical market anamoly that everyone thought could never actually stop the rising feature of the historically empirical data of inevitable outcomes. So, without lengthy digression of the montage scene I was experiencing and using the great fall from logical lending practices as a backdrop for a terrible equation of what is now today’s reality, I fit it together in a not so nice package.
Lots of circulating money and major corporations looking to increase profit margins by outsourcing to new borders so people like Archie are in ideal situations considering the concept that their job prospects are limited and the potential to work for a portion of what an American wage might be can be a gold mine of opportunity. Everyone wins in that scenario except the American who lost his/her job to outsourcing for a corporations profit. Ouch, I feel a bit like Micheal Moore writing this one.
So Archie doesn’t buy groceries in a US store, he doesn’t buy a flat screen in the local mega store who he also provides tech support for on the off hours. His money is not circulated back into the economy. Unemployment rates rise, our money is sent out to other countries citizens while we pay more taxes for corporate bail-outs and stimulus packages to throw us further into national debt or put the burden back on the jobless 3.6 million to pay for at the grocery store.
It’s not your fault Archie, in fact good for you for taking advantage of an incredible resume builder and what I would assume is a better quality of life where ever you might be. That is the essence of prosperity. In the halls of hopes and dreams we educate our kids to graduate with honors so that they can join the competitive job market where we don’t value their citizenship enough to employ them. Like a leak in the wealth reservoir our sustenance is drained to other places that need their own infusion of help and economic stimulus, but to what extent do we exhaust our coffers without feeding the mouths directly in front of us?
Without sounding too much like a bad Mel Gibson script on conspiracy, who can control our economic fate and impact the immediate need to feed the jobless? Unless we can create government jobs for all these poor souls we have to look to the card holders of commerce to save our Nation. The burden is on the outsourcing, excessive upper level income, enormous party budget, beneficiaries of more stimulus tax dollars called corporations. This is a scary position; the fate of millions is in the hands of those who just laid them off. The land of corporations has to have huge shift in perspective. They hurt in this economy as well and are paying the monetary price for cutting overhead on the 
home-front in what seemed logical business trends into other support countries. Those types of decisions have greatly contributed to our nation’s unemployment rate and unless they bring those jobs back, our Nation remains wounded.
How many of these businesses can be heard making attempts to make this a better Nation through their practices? How many have adapted their policies to bolster the struggling economy? How many top level executives have cut their salaries in order to keep a few more employees on their payroll?
I would love to hear these stories and have a renewed sense of patriotism in the American way. The rest of the world thinks of us as over-confident and greedy; it is hard to persuade otherwise when those able to help our own people make decisions to the contrary. Don’t destroy corporations, the victors of free enterprise, just implement ideas like “TQM” and “Transparency” outside the boardroom to the folks who used to serve you lattes and park your cars. Please, be responsible with our Nation’s fate, you are the new Fathers & Mothers of our Nation and we need you. Carefully consider what our hard earned tax dollars put you in the position to actually do to our economy. In the forefront of your thinking should be 3.6 million reasons it is important to change your approach.
Posted in Kansas City, Life As We Know It, Real Estate
Tags: bail out, business, business practices, corporations, credit crunch, economic stimulus, economy, housing market, Kansas City, Kansas City Real Estate, Lenders, outsourcing, property investing, Real Estate, real estate industry, real estate market, recession, thre great depression, unemployment
Danny Howell (not actually photographed here)
(Photo taken before Rehab)
ordinary bunny” scene and laughed at the possibility. For a moment my boys gently pet the wild animal and experienced “the wild” as can only be experienced in city limits with the exception of travelling petting zoos and smelly pet stores. From that point in the week I have dealt with a few wild animal issues that led to the inclination to write about it in this venue since I can easily draw the relevance to this site.
Big dogs bark very loudly.
# 6. Recognize that renting is the same as borrowing. 
#4. 
they tell you the kitchen sink is leaking, exposing themselves to awful smells, the potential for mold and more damage to the property than is necessary. Identify anything that sounds like water dripping and pick up the phone. The smallest leaks can cause tremendous damage. Do your part and help prevent problems related to leaks. Little critters & bugs like water sources and your leaks will give them a reason to stick around. All fingers point toward being responsible about reporting leaks in your rental unit.
Nathan Paradis 
#3 
included. 
(located on a cieling, floor or wall), open it and you should find one there. Go to your local hardware store and buy a dozen filters for approximately .75 a piece. This will be the best investment you can make to keep your utility bills down. It will keep your air cleaner & make it easier for your furnace blower to force air through the filters.
The financing for our rehab project was sorted out prior to closing (
With all the programs out there I have found that the basic functions found in 