Is Quality the Answer when it comes to fixing the global economy?

It seems like economic growth is fueled by the belief in something good. Once the good is created, waves of false excitement that lead to false growth get created as cheaper product imitations are made that leave the consumer with the initial belief that they are getting something valuable, for a lot cheaper.

Once the consumer realizes the new cheaper thing is not as good as what it replaced, nor as useful, consumer enthusiam disappears, the value plummets, and the economy crashes.

The initial desire to save the economy is to then try and just get things going again. But if we create things just to get things going again, and the creation isn't based on quality and longevity, there will be nothing to get excited about, hence no real growth, and the economy will just stagnate.

No matter how many times we are led to believe that quality is not the issue, there comes a moment in the economic spin cycle where quality and longevity does matter.

Just recently I read an article about how Detroit had already started retooling some engine plants to make more fuel efficient engines, and now that the price of gasoline was crashing, there was some regret being expressed that maybe Detroit had over reacted to the spike in fuel prices and retooled too quickly.

It will be interesting to see if quality and longevity can make a comeback. Right now it seems the speculators only know how to make a fast buck, which means quality won't make a comeback just yet, and neither will the economy.

How Far Would You Drive to Save a Few Cents per Gallon?

Just how far would you drive to find gasoline that was 8 cents cheaper per gallon? Eleven gallons of gasoline minus eight cents per gallon would save almost a dollar.

Or would it???



11 gallons would save approximately 88 cents at the gas station above. But when one factors in that the gas station was 1.5 miles out of the way, plus 1.5 miles for the return trip equals 3 extra miles traveled, or 1/8 of a gallon if your car gets 24 miles per gallon.

An 1/8 of a gallon costs approximately 60 cents nowadays.

So from the 88 cents in fuel savings we must now subtract the 60 cents in extra gasoline consumption, making for a grand total in savings of 28 cents!



The lesson is, if you buy gas from a gas station that is exactly enroute to where you are going anyways, you can offset slightly higher costs per gallon, versus going out of your way to find a slightly lower cost gasoline station.

Just what is the least amount of money you would be willing to save per tankful when the extra mileage to get the cheaper gas is taken into account? For my purposes, any savings less than 50 cents per tankful is probably not worth it. So I guess it was my bad when I went for the lower price but higher distance, as my net savings was approximately 28 cents.

Why it Really is Later Than We Think When it Comes to Petroleum and the Worlds Addiction to Oil.

Imagine that ethanol had been invented before gasoline. The advantages of Ethanol would be pretty apparent, one can grow their own fuel while remaining independent of all other countries and entities. Seed, water, soil, and sun and one can grow corn to make ethanol, wow.

Now imagine the ethanol pioneers wanting to resell excess ethanol. To meet this goal, and to increase efficiency and profits, a huge ethanol plant is built. At first glance the ethanol plant is doing spectacularly well as all the local growers bring their corn in for processing. Sooner rather than later, the nearby seasonal supply of corn is depleted.

To keep the ethanol plant busy, and profitable, corn is pipelined in. Oh wait a minute, corn cannot be pipelined in, because it's corn. The lightweight, volume enhanced corn has to be trucked in. It soon becomes apparent that as the distance the corn has to travel before it is ethanolized increases, the potential profits are consumed simply supplying ethanol fuel to the truck that is carrying the load of corn in for processing.

The corn to ethanol ratio works best when the corn is nearby, and almost doesn't work at all as that distance grows. To make matters worse, not only does the truck have to go and get the corn from the farm and then bring it back, all the while burning ethanol, another truck has to then be used to transport the flammable fluid to it's final destinations. Ethanol also is used to harvest the corn, and sadly, the fertllizer used to help grow the corn uses petroleum products as well. The result is way too much ethanol being used, to produce ethanol.

Petroleum has always been able to mask the wrongness of using itself, to make more of itself, until now. The wrongness with petroleum comes into play when petroleum energy is used to make more products, that also are petroleum dependent. If petroleum was only used to create products that in turn run off of non-petroleum based fuel, the world and its future would look a lot better.

I happened to catch Tammy Bruce (June 22, 2008) on the radio last Sunday afternoon, and it was appalling to hear her try and claim that the United States' over consumption of petroleum is something the rest of the world should bow down to in gratitude because the United States fuels the world's economy. This is nonsense.

The worst thing the United States could be doing is encouraging every other country to follow our "petroleum addicted" lead. Sadly, we seem to be doing a great job of addicting the rest of the world to petroleum.

When we use petroleum to make products that rely on the burning of petroleum to function, we are no different than the farmer driving their load of corn a far enough distance to basically burn up all the product that was to be made from selling the corn for ethanol in the first place.

How does this relate to Wall Street?

Wall Street does not want to acknowledge the super simple rule that using petroleum to make other products that rely on petroleum will be the quickest road to a worldwide economic meltdown. If Wall Street continues down the path of rewarding petroleum based products that create more petroleum based addiction with higher stock value, the surface of the planet and the industrialized nations that enhabit part of it will just be wiped out at a faster than expected rate.

Those less addicted to petroleum will probably survive at a better rate than the industrialized nations.

Solving the Home Owner Crisis Requires more than a Stimulus Check.

A better way to stimulate the economy is to eliminate interest rate charges for a while. An economic stimulus package in which the entire amount of the stimulus check goes towards higher gasoline prices is silly, no? If I were a bank and I was worried about millions of foreclosures, I would value keeping the homeowner making a monthly payment over simply foreclosing on them.

But for some inexplicable reason, the banks seem reluctant to waive interest payments. The obvious reason is that if they waive interest payments for some, they will have to do this for everybody. The reverse corollary to this reasoning is, if the banks don't waive interest payments, the debtors who lose their homes just become more of a drain on society, and it will be up to others to prop them up.

How about this idea. Waive all interest payments on home mortgages UNTIL a homeowner is no longer upside down on the house, plus 20% equity. So if a homeowner owes more on a house than the house is worth, they get to stay in the home as long a they make interest free payments. Once they have built up 20% equity in the home, they can either put the home up for sale, or agree to new terms that now involve interest.

Assuming banks have behaved ethically in how they have managed their homeowners loans, the above solution is a no brainer that helps everybody get through the current crunch. If it isn't done sooner rather than later, than we can assume the fix is in to imprison the american citizen for some ulterior motive.