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How to Fix the Economy

by on May.01, 2009, under life, thoughts

Phew… It’s about time I’ve made another blog post.  Show week always keeps me busy…

Anyway, let me preface this post by saying this: I’m 18.  The following contains my view of things from my perspective.  I could be completely wrong.  In fact, it would be awesome if some economy expert visited my blog and posted a comment about how wrong I am, but that probably won’t happen.  Now, on to the actual post!

I get annoyed when watching TV sometimes.  It’s one particular commercial strand.  From Wal-Mart, at that!  It’s their commercials about how going to Wal-Mart to get food is cheaper than going out, so you should buy food from Wal-Mart, because you need to save money in these poor economic times.  Makes sense, right?

Wrong.  In fact, this advice will only help destroy the economy wrong.  Wal-Mart is absolutely right: our economy isn’t doing that great right now.  However, they suggest a terrible way to fix it: stop spending money.  This is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done, and what the governemnt is trying to get done to fix the economy.

If every person in America took the money they had on hand (and, perhaps, grabbed some from home, too), went out and spent it on dinner at a restaurant, clothes, entertainment, etc., that would enormously help the economy.  The reason the economy sucks is because people have stopped spending money.  Of course, when the economy sucks, people stop spending money, so it’s just a vicious cycle.

The economic stimulus package was designed to do just this: give some large corporations a bunch of money to spend on expanding their business, making new products, or whatever, as long as the companies spent it right away.  But what’s happend?  The companies have said, “Sweet!  The government is giving us money even though our business is doing fine.  Let’s just tuck this away until we really need it, and keep doing our business in the poor economy,” and layoffs continue.

So, how should this work?  Companies need to use their stimulus money to pay, or even give raises/bonuses to people they were going to lay off.  This would give normal people some extra money, they would go out for dinner to celebrate, and money would start flowing again.  It’s this whole idea of  ”saving” that keeps our economy in the dump.

Now, I’m not trying to say that saving money is a bad thing.  Saving money is great, but there are certain times where it is appropriate.  If you are going to save money, don’t save it for “in case of a REALLY crappy economy,” save money to buy something expensive.  Once again, this keeps money flowing in our economy, which stimulates it.  I’m currently saving money, myself.  Both for college, and for Nokia’s next internet tablet.  When Nokia comes out with the new tablet, I’ll buy it, pour somewhere between $400 and $500 into the economy.

However, let me make it clear that I’m not saying you shouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart.  I’m just saying that you shouldn’t shop exclusively at Wal-Mart.  If you were planning on going out to dinner, go out to dinner.  Don’t stay in just because Wal-Mart says you should.  But go ahead and shop at Wal-Mart for most nights, when you just want to make dinner at home.  But, don’t shop exclusively at Wal-Mart.  This leads to monopolies, which also destroys the economy.

To sum things up, the basic question you need to ask yourself is this: what keeps the economy healthy?  The simple answer is just as obvious as it is true: spend money.  Spending money helps shops pay employees, which gives them money to spend, etc. etc.

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1 Comment for this entry

  • Brian Osborn

    I wish it could work out this way, but as much control as we think we could potentially have, and thinking things like “if only we did [insert thing]”, you have to realize that the major cause for this disaster is the Federal Reserve, as it is a private organization that controls our nations money supply, and their interests are to make profit. And since they have control of interest rates, they’ll raise and lower them to fluctuate whatever their interests are to make the most profit or control.

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