January 1, 2010

January 1, 2010

Dear kids and friends,


Happy New Year!

What does the future hold?

It’s traditional for older people to predict doom-and-gloom. I’m not sure. I tend to be an optimist (Shall we conduct a poll on that?). But I do think the U.S. is in for a long-term economic readjustment, principally because of the changes in manufacturing. Examples:
• The church in Virginia that was considering an organ was just then seeing the effect of the textile industry moving from their part of the world to 3rd world countries, leaving many empty factories and downtown stores. Decades earlier, the same textile industry had moved to Virginia from New England, leaving empty factories and stores in New England.
• A drive around smaller West Texas towns shows empty medium sized metal buildings that formerly contained small-scale factories feeding Bell Helicopter and Lockheed airplane plants in our county.

A straw in the wind: As an employer, our firm pays into the Texas unemployment fund. The amount that we contribute in 2010 will triple that paid in 2009. That’s 3 times as much. The fund needs more money because more people are unemployed now than a year ago.

This from William Greider: “I foresee a period of austerity in which consumption is essentially suppressed so households can save and restore their balance sheets. The economy would be driven instead by government investment in future production and the industrial transformation to a less profligate, more sustainable society. It is not World War II, but we are in an epic emergency.”

World War II? That’s the time when my parents, like Carol’s parents and the parents of my friends, raised a family in a small house with one bathroom. Greider doesn’t have the best reputation, and I don’t want to make him out as a guru. I doubt that we are in an epic emergency, as Greider writes. Furthermore, the statement “economy would be driven … by government investment in future production” makes me uncomfortable. But I think it would be wise to follow him in “…consumption is essentially suppressed so households can save and restore their balance sheets.”

So I recommend
• “…a less profligate, more sustainable” family budget, to quote Greider;
• Education.

Family budget: Save money. Don’t buy stuff. Cook rather than eat out. Play rather than be entertained.

Education: Schools and libraries.

The same Massachusetts that lost all that textile manufacturing several decades ago now has the highest high school graduation rate in the nation.

If I were the City of Fort Worth, I would expand the public library hours. Every time we visit our local branch library (we check out a lot of novels), it is full – I mean full – of patrons. There are lots of teenagers working on school projects. Many of the adults are working with tutors and on computers on ESL projects. There are lots of children and young persons browsing the books and magazines. I’d call it Literacy Live. These are people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, using books as boot hooks. If they succeed, it’s a better future for all of us. That library needs to be open Sunday afternoon and every evening of the week.

On the other hand, maybe we are better off, like Texas Tech (I spent a really good semester there in 1958 and would have stayed if the organ bug had not bit so hard during the Thanksgiving break), to pay the football coach$2,540,000 a year. Or like TCU, reportedly paying their football coach a base salary of $1.7 million a year through 2014.

It’s easy to find coaches’ salaries on the Internet, but it’s hard to find how much the players (employees) are paid. Whatever it is, I’ll bet it’s not enough.

-- Ross King