Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Change...Why It's Needed And How It Will Be Achieved
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Old 04-06-2009, 07:28 PM
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Originally Posted by l2ridehd View Post
To say our system has not worked for the past 30 or 40 years is not true....Our major problems have only been in the last year with the housing bust which caused the market bust...
I don't totally disagree I2. Much of the last 30-40 years will be remembered as some pretty good times, times of some pretty significant accomplishment. But it sure seems that the work ethic and moralities of the post-war era and the gray flannel suit generation were slowly replaced by a side towards selfishness, greed, and an erosion of personal morality.

The problem that finally popped within the last year or two wasn't just the result of prior Congresses irrationally pushing for more "affordable housing". Looking at even that problem a little more deeply, what they did was a blatant and self-serving attempt to placate the lower classes so they would re-elect those same members who created the laws you refer to.

The cause of our current situation isn't a few laws which were enacted by Congresses past. Rather, it is the slow and insidious erosion of our cultural mores. That's happened over time and is reflected in everything from the emergence of a drug culture to a President having sex in the oval office to many, many Congressmen "on the take" to Wall Streeters who designed financial products that they knew bore huge amounts of risk, and finally to the public who was perfectly happy to borrow money on a basis that even a high-schooler could see made no sense. It was a simple, long slide into a pretty dark moral place.

The bubble popped a year or so ago. But the cause has been festering for a lot longer. No one President or one administration is going to solve it. It'll take a lot longer than that. I hope as a people that we can get back to what we do remember as some really good times. It seems to me that to accomplish that is going to take a lot of self-examination by all Americans, probably quite a lot of lifestyle-changing, and a whole lot less of the laissez les bons temps rouler! attitude.