CONSUMPTION ECONOMY

Let me ask you a question? Would you rather earn a hundred dollars making a piece of furniture or selling a piece of your living room furniture? Most people gain tremendous satisfaction from producing something. So why is it that our leaders would rather you buy a piece of furniture than produce it. They think it’s just fine to keep selling off our future and putting consumption ahead of production. We measure the health of our economy in terms of consumer confidence. Why don’t we measure it in production confidence or job confidence? Everything we do is ingrained on consumption. Just think about how the holiday shopping season has such an impact on our economy. Why is Black Friday more important than Earth Day? Consumption is OK but as a priority it weakens us and turns our all our citizens into borrowers. And mounting debt often drives people to make bad decisions in both business and personal matters. Our government leads by example and is the biggest borrower of all. Did you know that every time a baby is born he or she is rewarded with over $60,000 worth of national debt? Thanks Washington! Every American regardless of our age is paying $115 per month in interest on this debt. A family of four is paying $460 per month of interest probably without knowing it. And this is just interest – it doesn’t pay off one cent of the debt.

Furthermore this unequally impacts those in the lowest economic rung because it represents a much higher percentage of their income. The only way a consumption based economy can achieve significant growth is by bringing more people up to the middle class. And with all his debt we create the opposite effect.

Our cyclical consumption model is self-destructive and reduces economic growth. We can’t buy our way to real growth. Every economist will tell you that only production leads to growth. And with our population growth rate under 1% for the last 20 years it’s unreasonable to expect a gross national product to be multiples higher without a fundamental change of what we are doing.

Think of our economy as a snow globe. In the globe we have: business, consumers and government. When we shake the globe the money floats around between all three and it looks like a beautiful snowy paradise. But then when we need to pay the interest on the 18 trillion dollars of government debt and the 800 billion dollars of annual trade deficits this creates a big hole in the globe and the water just keeps draining out. And regardless of how much our leaders shake it up – it doesn’t stop the leaks. This problem cannot get fixed from inside this vacuum. Politicians try to distract us from the fact that they don’t have any real solutions so they keep shaking up the globe with new tax strategies, borrowing and scapegoats. They think if they keep reshuffling the deck with gimmicky maneuvers that we’ll get a different result. I think that’s the definition of insanity.

The only way to fundamentally fix the problem is to start filling that globe back up with more water. And to do that we need to reach outside our bubble and begin producing goods and services to the rest of the world. Until we realize this, we stay trapped inside and the water level continues to drain down.

The 2020plan is specifically designed to address this fundamental issue and it creates a pipeline to the world and exports our greatest natural resources so we can refill our economy. In the mean time we restructure from a consumption based economy to a producer of high Tec goods and services that will support the life blood of nations around the globe. And this will result in a whole new generation of modern jobs.

So now let’s ask our opening question in a different way. Would you rather earn your living stocking shelves at a retail store or creating the products that are being sold there? Production beats consumption in every way – every day.