$$$?

For those interested -- and let's assume that's all of you -- I switched to lemon ginseng flavored green tea today. Much better. Well, drinkable, anyway.

This leads us naturally to discuss the economy. (What? I don't see the link, you say. Well, there isn't one. Are you happy now that you've pointed it out? Sit down and be quiet.) And the economy is bad.

How bad is it?

Stop that, it's not a joke! Well, I guess there is some humor in learning that our number of billionaires have decreased. Apparently many of them are only mega-millionaires now. How will they live? You just know they're not going to be able to use food stamp cards or know the proper etiquette for the soup line. Poor sad millionaires. My heart goes out to them, but not very far.

So bad economy. It's certainly touched my town. Money is tight, tight, tight. People are being laid off. Businesses are closing. Dogs and cats are living together without the benefit of clergy. Will this nightmare ever end?

Probably not, particularly since the best our leaders have been able to come up with is for us to spend more money. That's right. We consumers need to consume more. We have an economy that requires the majority of people participating in it to spend more. How did that happen? How did we let it happen?

A little simple math would tell us that an economy couldn't grow forever. Not without careful planning. And one thing we Americans have been shown repeatedly is that our government apparently cannot plan.

I'll be coming back to this over the next few months and offering more thoughts on our economy and what we can do to weather these lean times. But for now, it's late and I need sleep!

Talk to you soon.

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