Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Under 30 and over 55

The people who tend to be hit the hardest by the economic downturn since about 2007 tend to be under 30 and over 55. For example, one child out of 4 in the U.S. is on food stamps right now, 25% of all children are on food stamps. Another fact, that hit me fairly close to home was that even though it was great news to hear my wife's best friend's daughter was going to have a baby and they wanted to get married, they couldn't get married because she didn't have insurance at her job to have the baby. So they had to not get married until after the baby was born to afford to have the child. This just seemed kind of sad to me. I notice since there are no jobs many young people in their early 20s are now having children rather than finishing college because they don't want to go bankrupt from student loans and not be able to afford to ever get married because they can't get a job. So there is all kinds of out of the box creative thinking going on by people trying to economically and emotionally and health wise survive these difficult times.

Yesterday, I heard how difficult it is for those over 55 to get another job. In my own way of looking at things I always thought you had to have your own self sustaining business by 40 because of this problem. But I guess many people don't think this way. However, depending upon ANY corporation or company to be there for you when you are over 40 is very iffy at best. So, I was listening to how many people over 55 have already gone through ALL their retirement savings already in three or four years trying to desperately live and find another job before they are out on the streets mostly to no avail. I heard about people over 55 not having enough money for their medicines and so taking only 4 doses of medicine a week instead of 7 to be able to afford enough medicines and still eat and pay their rent or mortgage. The problems of the under 30 are only made even worse by the over 55 year old. So I think the over 55's are comparable to the under 15s in this respect of the kinds of problems they are facing now. So, once again the very old and the very young suffer the most in all ways through this kind of world economic calamity. What they future will bring no one really knows at this point.

However, if I as an intuitive and a student of world history were to make a guess we will see possibly about 10 to 20 years of the kind of stuff we see now. We appear to be in something similar to Japan went through the last 20 years that they call stagflation. Which means that we have economic stagnation combined with potential inflation. This combination is very difficult to pull out of for any nation or group of nations. If you add to that Global Climate change which is reducing every year the capacity to grow cheap food you can also see that population on earth likely now will begin to decrease. If it doesn't start decreasing expect all sorts of new and different kinds of problems to occur. In past historical times overpopulation problems were solved by plagues and by wars and major starvation. However, because of nuclear weapons large wars can't happen without extincting all or most life on earth. And plagues are unlikely because of medical technology growing towards potential immortality for some or all eventually of mankind. So, the kinds of problems the human race will now face are completely unlike anything the human race has ever seen before in recorded history. So, expect people to be sort of slow on the uptake because of this

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