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Highlands Today

Is Our Economic Collapse Actually A Valuable Lesson?

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 19, 2008

Could all this economic mayhem actually be healthy on some level, or is that some lame attempt at finding a silver lining on something that has no upside? It's difficult to say there is a bright side, but it's clear we were drowning in phony numbers and a day of reckoning was long overdue. Perhaps the surprise is that it took so long for it to happen.

Our nation's greediest people took Americans for a ride. As painful as it is to say, a lot of us enjoyed it for quite a while. Remember when we were giddy with our stock market returns; when our home values were incredible and it seemed like we could attain just about anything economically? When we didn't save money but instead put it all on credit, because it was easy. It was fun stuff. The problem, of course, is that it was all artificial. Some of it was even criminal and a lot of innocent people are suffering because of those actions.

There's nothing enjoyable in a market correction that puts people out of their houses and jobs are lost. Just as saddening are the many people chasing the American dream of business ownership who lost their life savings by having the bad luck of starting a business before the house of cards collapsed.

It's clear that decades ago, when credit requirements began to loosen up, and in the last 10 years, when they almost went away altogether, that we had trouble on our hands. Thousands of people made millions and billions of dollars conning us into games we could never win, at least not in the long run. The people we hired and elected to make sure the game was fair didn't do their jobs. It's all falling apart right now.

About the only thing we know is that it will get better at some point. We don't know when that will happen, and there certainly will be many more people suffering before it's all over. But we pray that the greed, corruption and ignorance that brought us to this point is eliminated, controlled, regulated and most importantly, that we all learned a valuable lesson. Otherwise we're doomed for it to happen again.

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