Thursday, December 04, 2008

Where's My Bailout?

As a small business owner of Vignette Studios, I am amazed at all the money being thrown into the financial systems, banks, markets, and possibly the auto industry now. All this is supposedly to keep a huge meltdown of the system from happening, with the original theory of helping out main street. Well guess what? The meltdown happened anyway. But I often ask myself, where is my bailout? I have tried hard to keep my debt down, have refused to mortgage my house to the hilt, have always managed to pay my bills even in tight times, and have tried hard to keep people employed. In spite of all this, my industry, which has been slowing down for the past few years, has collapsed the last six months. I am worried that everything I have worked hard for, might all be lost. So why isn't the feds coming to my aid? Instead of handing out billions upon billions to a few key companies, where I will never see any of that money, and they are still shedding thousands of jobs anyway, which makes the economy worse, and we just continue to spiral down, why not send each small business owner a hundred grand or so? That would keep millions of people employed, keep small business doors open, and keep us from defaulting. I think the feds, if they want to throw out money, need to truly help Main Street.

That being said, I am optimistic that we are closer to the end of this mess than the beginning. My business is directly tied to the residential market, and the residential market will come back first and help to lead the country out of the mess. All markets are local, and many will come back before the national market will. Our market, in Northern Colorado, did not get the massive buildup and runup in prices that California, Nevada, and other places did, therefor we did not fall as bad. All the indicators are out there that we have reached bottom, and will start climbing our way out. All we need is some confidence.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to Post a Comment The recession really isn't that bad if you know where to look. The bailout money is spilling over to us believe it or not. I've done research and found that there is more money than what you think...

Bailout Spillover

Anonymous said...

Here, here. In conversations with friends, I call people like you and me, "we the prudent." If we stashed our money in retirement funds, we only enriched a bunch of Wall Street guys. If we have a bank account, we can look forward to inflation making it valueless.

And why can't GM just suck up and make a car I would WANT to buy?

I'm in a bad mood about all this. Thanks for bringing it up.

Terence C. Hoaglund, ASLA said...

I can say, that for myself, I have always tried to support the american car manufactures. Every car I have owned has been an american brand...though not necessarily built in this country. The exception to that was my wife's Honda that we purchased 7 years ago. I can say, that car has not given us any problems, but all the american made cars sure have.

However, I havn't bought any vehicles in 7 years, so I really can't speak to recent quality. I guess I am one of those that is causing the car companies problems. If I had more stable income, I would probably be taking advantage of some of those 0% financing deals.