Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Recession, global downturn, credit crunch, whatever label you want to attach to it the end result is the same. Economic slowdown, investment cutbacks and rising unemployment. Bad news..or is it?

How many businesses large and small have been "re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic" for years, doomed to failure but none the less determined to keep sailing on. Then along comes the recession and its game over. The point is that people still need the services and products that they did before the recession.

However, the recession could be the end of an old era and a new beginning. A better partnership between government and people rather than government and big business. What do I mean by this?  If a major employer is failing and it looks like mass lay-offs are on the way politicians suddenly find huge amounts of money to keep it going and keep it going and well, you get the picture.
 Why not instead use that money to create start up enterprise. Sweep away a lot of the regulation, taxes and so on and create low cost or even no cost local retail/industrial start up units.
 After all, if a large subsidy supports a large failing company to keep going till the next election and it fails, nothing except time has been gained. On the other hand give this money to say twenty small start ups and ten make it and out of those ten five become real  winners, not only have you helped some with the "get up and go" to realise their dream and help secure their own future, but the potential has been created for better healthier future growth with the jobs that go with it.
 Does that sound to radical or even socialist, or is it time for a new more radical approach to economic stimulus? Stop bailing out the big guys with a boat full of holes and start helping the start ups.

Michael Savage had a brilliant idea the other evening, regarding what can we do for our military veterans who`ve been maimed for life, or for the families of those men and women who`ve been killed in action.

His proposition, apparently coming from Alexander the Great, is to exempt the families and/or the wounded veterans from all taxes for life.

Consider how little money that would be in relation to a multi-trillion dollar deficit. And yet, would that ever happen? Not a chance in today`s political climate.

The problems we`re facing are fundamental and systemic. I agree that a massive Depression, including all the catastrophic financial meltdowns that would accompany it would ultimately be beneficial. Many, many people would be severely hurt, and many others likely would die. But the problems we face are the result of nearly 100 years of unbelievably bad management.

We don`t need the government to be using money to do anything about helping people. We need the government to be an oversight system, for the single purpose of handling situations where single entities (people or companies) are taking advantage of people.

The problem there is that a society, including both its individual citizens AND its organized business sub-structures, requires a clear morality---a moral code and set of values. Since those are also missing, there`s no solution other than to watch it all collapse.

Out of that collapse we`ll likely discover that morals and values actually do matter.

All very true, we are going through the "pain barrier" with this global recession. When the right people are in the right place making the right decisions (cometh the hour ,cometh the man), the wheel may turn full circle and things can start to get on track again.
Out of it all might emerge a realisation that the days of easy money, get rich quick and spending more than you earn are a huge chunk of what caused the problem to start with, it couldn`t go on forever.

Texas does have some really excellent systems in place.