fat mogul

First order of business for the Handyman’s League (decided I liked league better than party) is to determine the issues at hand, the things that are in severe need of some duct tape.  Since it would be a rather boring post (more boring than usual even) for me to just go off on a list of things that need to be fixed, I’ll just start with one, and work up the beginnings of a fix for the issue.

So, obviously with the nation, as well as the world, as it currently is, the biggest issue we could possibly face is the economy.  With so many of our nation’s largest corporations struggling, mostly due to poor management and/or business planning skills, our country, as well as many other countries around the world, is entering (or has entered) a recession.  And, as I’m sure every-one’s aware, our nation’s leaders determined that the best course of action would be to gather up a ton o’ money and hand it out to all of these struggling businesses in an attempt to jump start the economy.  I believe those same leaders are starting to see the major weakness in that plan.  However, the question continues to beg, how does one fix the economy?  It seems that our nation is so confused about monetary matters, that we just toss money at things in the hopes that it will fix things.  I mean, heck, it worked for FDR’s New Deal, didn’t it?  . . .  Yeah. . .

So, we see the issue, and we see that our nation’s already attempted some duct taping over the weak joints, but it just doesn’t seem to be making a difference.  Banks have been swallowed up by other banks, GM is on the verge of closure almost every day, and we’ve got many different large businesses declaring bankrupcy.  I mean, Six Flags, just declared Chapter 11 on a several billion dollar debt, which will now be able to be severely lessened, meaning someone else is not getting their money back, meaning someone else is going to be further hurting for money as well. 

But what’s the root issue?  I mean, no matter how much we seem to push money around from one place to the other, or borrow money from China in order to push in more areas, we still seem to be hemorrhaging money at an astronomical rate.  And that’s what I would consider the key word, hemorrhaging.  Thing of our current economic status as a giant wound, gushing out blood (dollars).  No matter what we do to cover the wound, it still seems to continue gushing, no coagulants (read: bailouts) seem to want to make it stop.  After a while, you’ll start running low on blood and need to receive a transfusion (ie borrow money from other nations).  However, that doesn’t actually fix the wound, that just allows it to bleed out even longer. 

BUT, what if our nation could create more “blood” on it’s own, not requiring a transfusion, but is actually producing more than it’s losing.  How does that happen?  Simple, by producing goods and services that other nations would need.  That means we need to completely rethink our strategy.  Right now, we’re thinking like old-school America.  Old-school America was an America that still believed we could stay out of world affairs because they didn’t directly concern us.  Today’s America needs to realize that we’re dealing with a global economy.  That means, we need to stop looking inwards so much, but outwards.  We need to start thinking of ourselves as one giant business, because that’s exactly what we’ve become.

That’s a lot of words still without any resolution option offered.  So, here goes, the Handyman’s League’s official preliminary business plan for America. 

1.  Stop giving money to failing businesses.  These guys are just continuing to use the money in the same way as they previously were, causing us to have to continually bail them out further.  If a business wants to be bailed out, we need a fully legitimate business plan for how they are going to get back on their feet within 5 years, as well as their plans to immediately cut expenses  at the corporate level without cutting jobs.  Even banks require this type of information when giving out loans, why can’t we when we’re giving out money?

2.  Hire a venture capitalist firm with experience in products that interest foreign countries.  Instead of focusing our large amounts of money on what used to work, we need to be looking to the future.  The first part of that is, of course, investing in new technologies, products, and services.  First, by investing in such things, we can make deals to ensure that these investments will create new jobs on our soil.  Second, by investing in companies that focus on selling things over-seas, we can increase our exports, thereby increasing the value of the dollar.  The more money we receive from other countries, the more money we have (or less we owe to China. . .).  We want to bring in viable currency from an external source, meaning not money that we have to pay back, but money that we own. 

       2a.  There are certain previsions that are currently being put in place that will work towards this, such as the monies that are being promises to alternative energy sources, which is of great interest to foreign countries.  But I think that we should have a multi-fold financial attack on the our neighbors across the oceans.  We need to look towards venture capitalist firms with a strong history of backing stable products with, once again, that strong foreign interest.

3.  Raise minimum wage.  There is absolutely no reason that our poverty level should be higher than the minimum amount of money we pay a full time employee.  I don’t care if this will make things harder for small businesses, corporations, or anyone.  We should not allow people who work full time to live under the poverty level, period.  If businesses can’t handle it (and I’m sorry small businesses, because I love you very much and I know you’ll get hurt most by this) they’ll have to rethink their business strategy.

4.  Directly comes from number 3.  Support entrepreneurs by introducing better hand-holding options for business management.  We currently have great options such as the SBDCs, but I think they could go even further.  This is almost a fail safe option, as there’s many people out there with the financial backing, and the ideas, but not enough of a business-abled brain to actually run a business.  We need to fix this.

5.  For my final bullet point, I unfortunately don’t have a good answer.  I do, however, have a suggestion.  Although I definitely enjoy the idea of higher taxes for the wealthy, as it seems like a great way to bring this money back into the economy, redistribution of wealth really isn’t the answer.  BUT. . . if we were to provider investing subsidies into viable entries into the foreign markets, I believe we would see a great amount of movement of funding from the upper upper class which would once again envigorate the economy merely by having the money move around, instead of sitting in savings accounts and trust funds.

Obviously just a start, and I’m in no way an financially minded individual.  But I believe there’s much that we can do to move in the right direction, and here’s just a few ideas that don’t seem to be being pursued quite strongly enough at the moment.

Tomorrow, I will give you some ideas on what can be done for health care reform, Mr President.

1. Derekp says:

   June 24, 2009 at 1:21 pm

   I think i’ve seen this somewhere before…but it’s not bad at all