We are in a really strange economy

[K8-EEE]

Necessities (housing, food, health care, gas) cost so damn much that people might not be able to even afford the poison made in China crap!

[Captain Angry]

1. I wonder what credit card balances will look like this time next year.

Over the past few years, a lot of people refinanced their houses and took cash out thanks to the increasing equity in their homes.

Now that prices are falling, and mortgages are being reset, the refinances will slow. Which means the cashouts will slow.

If this year doesn't suck tremendously, next year will be an unmitigated disaster for the people that have overspent and undersaved.

High food/gas/health costs are just going to make it worse.

I'm sure we'll see a program soon that gives each US Citizen $100 for gas money or something. Because giving us free money to give back to oil companies is capitalistic. Forcing a price cut on oil companies or an efficiency standard onto vehicles would be communistic.

[Angela Shelley]

8. People in communist systems

don´t live over their incomes "until the lights go out".

[K8-EEE]

12. Wow you're right about that....

It's funny that the definition of "communistic" is our tax money working for US instead of the corporations.

[Warpy]

2. We're in a late 1929 economy

A few rich men hold most of the wealth. Our net worth, the equity in our houses, is evaporating. Most of us have started to use plastic debt for everyday necessities because our paychecks won't stretch that far, just as people used debt to buy into the stock bubble in the late 20s to give them paper profit to compensate for disappearing net worth in housing. The top is drowning in wealth while the bottom is drowning in debt.

Bad things happen when this is allowed to occur by deregulation.

This will be the last Xmas bought on plastic.

[yardwork]

3. No shit.

[ingac70]

4. Oh, we are still being poisoned...

Food and ingredients are shipped from China, and now the gov't, after questioning the safety of drugs from Canada, wants to import drugs from China!!

They'll make darn sure they kill us off, and we won't even be able to enjoy our short lives by being poisoned with frivolous crap paid for with expendable income! They'll get us with the nessecities instead.

[flashl]

10. Poison you say? How about ...

Lobbying for Cancer

Industry special interests are burying information on cancer-causing chemicals and, according to watchdog groups, the government is helping them do it—in the name of “data quality.”

In a study of the National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program, OMB Watch, a DC-based policy-research group, reports that industry is frustrating the work of government researchers with petitions that are light on science but heavy with accusations of anti-business “bias.”

Public interest advocates warn that corporations are co-opting the federal Data Quality Act to paralyze scientists with frivolous allegations of inaccuracy, driving a stealth assault on public-health research.

In 2000, Congress passed the Data Quality Act under the guidance of lobbyist Jim Tozzi, a former administrator with the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan who now heads the industry-backed Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE). The two-paragraph statute broadly mandates that agencies uphold “the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of information” they disseminate.

That’s a laudable principle, critics say, but the corporate-friendly Bush administration is promoting exploitation of the law.

[lovuian]

5. Jobs loss will increase and Housing prices will fall

its Hard times ahead

[sarcasmo]

11. Come to Michigan, hard times are already here.

The Recession has arrived, the Depression is on the horizon.

[Quantess]

6. You can decorate your home with cheap baubles for next to nothing.

But healthy food is not cheap. A bag of apples costs more than a bag of dust-gathering-stuff from the Dollar Tree.

[PDJane]

7. There's nothing strange about it.

The economy is being steered towards a depression/prolonged depression/long-term war.

[Didereaux]

9. nearing a possible burst of 'hyper-inflation' ... that would not be so good folks!