It is dinner time but.................... AA don't know your age but I am 62 and my 1st savings account paid 4% interest. My home mortgage was 12% and I got a deal as it was a 15 yr contract, ( 2nd house VA the 1st ) and what my wife and I could afford was dominated by the interest rates but my present home is 6% thanks to goverment policies but my CD pays 1.8% thanks to goverment policies. It was not always this way, in fact my mother had to barrow the down payment from and attorney ( sorta 2nd ) to finance the farm she and my step father bought. Bottom line is the government altered the economy at a basic level by feeding money to the banks with the federal reserve and created ever cheaper loans for housing as time went on................. until everyone top to bottom got greedy. Now we don't get 8 or 9 % on CD's and save we put it in IRA's or 401k's which do ok unless the stock market tanks, which it did AGAIN. Our monetary system is broke and it will get fixed one way or the other but it will be painful.

When I was young you rented or bought a fixer upper and slowly as you got older worked up in the quality of housing you could afford. Always aware you HAD to make your payment in hard times. Well that 30 year ride is over and despite what politicians say is not coming back. I was reading tonight that the real unemployment rate is over 17% when you factor the long term unemployed. As a people we have went from a thrifty and very conservative financial method borne out of the great depression, to a nation that literally lives on credit. Which is not good but what is killing us is the fact that government has been doing the same X10 and the jig is up. Sometime after 2015 all the taxes presently collected will just cover the interest on the national debt. As a song in the 70's by Ten Years After said " tax the rich, feed the poor, till their is no rich no more " ................. oh yes the next verse was I' d love change world.............

Argue this, argue that, blame the R's, blame the D's which you see on this BB, but all bs aside we as a people at a very basic level altered how we live our lives. The damn problem is it was on borrowed money ........................ I am a boomer and most of us boomers are doing ok. The problem is one, we are leaving one hell of a debt for our grand kids as many of the things we did as a society WAS ON BARROWED MONEY, two we or our bloody kids have never really known super bad times as our grand parents did in the depression and you know what we do not know how to deal with it. The sad thing is I think we are about to learn the hard way.....................