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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Monday, February 08, 2010 at 14:31:33 :
In Reply to: Re: no problem posted by Jerry in Idaho [64.139.238.43] on Monday, February 08, 2010 at 12:01:40 :
...things are getting better, the unemployment rate dropped surprisingly much last month, down to only 9.7% (if you don't count the people who have given up looking for work or who are working at minimum-wage jobs because they couldn't find anything decent) stocks are way up compared to this time last year. Or as John Fluke, Jr. used to say when I worked at Fluke in the early '80s, which was a recession in the electronics business, "We're well-positioned for the expected upturn."
I expect house building and I.T. are going to be around for a while since people need houses and computers are handy. At least those jobs will come back. Not sure what all those Wall Street MBA investment banker money-manipulating whiz kids are going to find to do. The trouble with their line of work is that it doesn't actually produce anything.
There's two things that are saving us here: I-90 and $17 silver. I-90 makes sure the gas stations, restaurants, and motels extract a little money from the people passing through, and $18 silver keeps the mines running, much to the dismay of the EPA which has been spending the past 30 years trying to shut them all down forever. All the outside experts kept telling us the tourism was the wave of the future, mining should be relegated to some quaint artifacts in a museum, and all the old mines and mills should be closed down, demolished, bulldozed, and "remediated". I think people are beginning to wise up and see that tourism is just another industry, with its up and down cycles and its environmental impacts just like any other. When times are tough, what do people cut back on -- house payments or ski trips? The good side if it is that some people who would have rather gone on some expensive far away vacation instead stay closer to home. Maybe instead of flying to the Caribbean, they take a car trip to Yellowstone. The bad side is most all the tourism jobs are minimum wage. A good miner makes $40/hr. A good motel housekeeper makes $7.25. If the EPA would get out of the way, we could re-open the Bunker Hill, and open one or two new mines as well. At some point, we have got to have an economy based on people actually producing things of value, rather than just shuffling the same money around from one computer to another in ever more clever ways.
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