Milking Our Confidence Back
Mulling over how I plan to make my own ends meet, an epiphany of sorts hit me like a Barry Bonds homer into McCovey Cove: our economy is no more to be feared than the cat down the road playing joyfully with a field mouse.
We read about consumer confidence, how we have all become "shivering denizens" of the mad realm of our economy. Here is how I process what we have really, ultimately, have done to ourselves.
Go down to your convenience store and buy a gallon of milk. You are paying roughly 4 bucks for the cow's labor. Now, if we broke this down with simplicity, it could be something like: $.12 cents for the labor involved in the transaction (at national minimum), we'll say $.29 for the plastic jug, $1.40 for the substance inside and $1.80 for the miscellaneous work of transport, marketing, labels, etc. Now, you have a small store profit that gets generated back into the same transaction, which in turn employs the cashier, turns a profit for the owners, and keeps Farmer John and his faithful bovines moving and fed.
So, what's the point? We have ourselves scared into helping Farmer John and his minion of pasturites because of an unfaithful stock market that most of the rural folks could care less about - yet it is directly affecting them. Our national morale has dropped because 1 man, or a body of men and women, have told us to watch out. But, of course, don't tell this to them while they spend your tax dollars putting on the 17th at noon.
We can raise our own confidence by ignoring the candor of a computer's number and start by confidently building, sharing, investing in each man and woman's job. That job sends the trickle down effect until it reaches - you bet - the lowly gallon of 2% sitting in a cooler. Unbelievable how that one item can employ millions down the line.
The moral of this opinion? Milk: it does the economy good.
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