2 ????s: Is recession coming? How will it affect your homesteading?

Family was the secret to what allowed people to survive. We've thrown that away big time. My parents were raised during the depression in NYC, they had horses(for work) hogs, chickens, and rabbits. Heard plenty of stories about them going to the dump to sift thru ashes for pieces of coal. Also some of the other maybe not so good things they did also to survive.
Now we have few true families(think Waltons mtn.) and fewer people with the skills to survive, even most of the country dwellers can't or don't do much for themselves today.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

The great depression was very turbulent, with rich & poor affected, and sometimes in unexpected and unlikely ways.

re: stock market:
It wasn't a single crash in 1929. After that decline, it went back up significantly, then declined much more to a new low in 1932. Then rose, and had another big decline in 1937 (?). Hence the saying: "The dumb money got wiped out in 1929, the smart money didn't get wiped out until 1932. The really smart money didn't get wiped out until 1937."

Bank failures meant many people's life savings vanished. Even if they weren't in the stock market, many "rich" people suddenly found themselves poor.

Many poor people who thought they couldn't get any poorer discovered they could. Agricultural prices crashed, and many farmers who had what used to be modest mortgages suddenly couldn't pay it, and lost the farm. If you owned a farm free and clear, but it happened to be in the "dustbowl", you couldn't make a living, or grow enough food to eat. Certainly some wealthy and some poor people were relatively unaffected, but it wasn't uniform, and the pain wasn't always felt by the people that engaged in risky behavior. I've heard it said that nobody "wins" in a depression, the best you can do is lose less than everyone else.

(note: the two quotes above disagree with which is the "worst" since the great depression, possibly because one includes unemployment, and the other looks only at GDP decline? Anyway, it should put the scale in rough proportion -- no recession since has been near as bad as the great depression.)

The negatives we have in the country today are: (1) far fewer people with any farmers, gardeners, in the family, (2) far less social cohesion and higher levels of tension between groups (ethnic, political, socio-economic, etc), (3) an already very large gov't with high debt levels.

--sgl

How do you figure that? And no I'm not a Bush supporter.

I think he refers to the surplus and the first payments reducing the debt having been made while Clinton was in office, prior to the big tax cuts ushered in with the GOP takeover, the annual deficits, then the additional deficit spending to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (one of which I support), and the ballooning by 66% of the national debt in 7 years. There's plenty of blame to go around both parties for all that. I recall a bunch of Dems voted for the expensive Iraq war, as well as Republicans, for example. Now we are being asked to deficit fund another $42 billion for it. This steals directly from our standard of living as a nation. There is no free lunch.

It's nearly an unassailable economic fact among economists that a very large and growing portion of the economic expansion that has occurred since 9/11 has been funded by deficit spending, the government being the largest aggregate consumer of goods in the country. The secondary, but also large, piece was funded by consumer and corporate debt. Lagging in third are cash purchases. So we party now and pay later.

There are certain things I would stomach deficit spending for, namely infrastructure which is necessary to a healthy economy, and legitimate expenses pertaining to the defense of the homeland, of which I consider the Afghanistan war an example.

Otherwise, I am a huge pay-go guy. If you recall, pay-go was one of the first things dismantled when the GOP gained control. So it's somewhat humorous to me to hear accusations of Democrats being "tax and spend," when Republicans are "borrow and spend." In many places the difference between the parties is exceedingly thin, and I don't see pay-go being rapidly reinstated if Democrats take firmer control in the next cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. looks more like post-colonial England with each passing year, and China looks more like post WW II America.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

The "Bush could have paid of the debt" thing is arguably true.

The "Bush inherited a booming economy" thing is demonstrably false.

There is always a recession or depression going on in this nation everday. What makes the difference is who is reporting the news, your geograpgic area and weather or not "its your bull getting gored today".

The same analysts who gloomily predict the fall of the American economy today are the same ones who were tap dancing during the last rally and will do so during the next.

Financial analysts remind me of the professional poker players you see on televised tournements. One says they play a trapping game, another says they play a tight game. The guy at the far end of the table says he plays tight and the woman on the dealers button tells the audience at home she has to play agressive to dominate the other experienced proffesionals at the table.

One the cards are in the air, the folks at home see only one thing clearly. All the card players regardless of how they claim to play are gonna bluff with weak pockets, fold strong nut hands, lie through their teeth or truthfully tell others about their hold cards. All the while knowing everyone at the table is playing on guts and luck and will watch it later on their Tivo.

My father told me the difference between a recession and a depression was that a recession is " when the folks down the street lose their job and home. A depression is when your brother in law loses his job and him, your sister and their kids are on your doorstep expecting to move in with you " just till they get back on their feet"". Its all just perspective ,timing , luck of the draw with a little cushioning depending on if you prepare a little bit, play your guts , the hand your dealt and how ruthless you can be to keep yourself solvent.

This weeks big news is how SoCal is going up in flames. Pretty depressing if your one of the suckers burned out. In a few weeks the big news will be the new housing boom in SoCal showing crews knocking together new shacks on the ashes. All the talk will be of the many construction jobs that still need filling in the area.

The gloomy analysts today will once again be tap dancing on their news reports, no reference of the subprime collapse of the past few months will be made and the most successful financial gamblers will be check raising on the market game hoping to drag in a pot.

Those without a big enough stake to play the big financial game will hedge their bets with small savings, kitchen gardens and belt cinching while they hope a whale playing at the table doesn't try to bully them into going all in when they dont have the strong pocket cards to weather the economic hand of the game of Life they are playing.

There might be some negativity about illegal aliens taking home building jobs from citizens, but the analyst tap dance will continue, maybe even with a sand on the floor shimsham slide finish as the news hour draws to a close.

Personally , I will be one of the ones doing the best to keep my meager savings going, trying to keep my yard hay mulched, my native wine fruits viable, the winter garden going, planning the spring garden and if I'm lucky, I will fit a road trip in so I can hit a casino in Missisippi or Lousiana on my way to see some friends in Texas for my winter vacation.

So in answer to the question " Is a recession coming???", the answer is "No, its already here".

Recessions and depressions are just a part of the Game of Life we all play. How well each of us evaluates our own hand decides how prominent they appear as we play , bluff and gamble.

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"I didn't have time to slay the dragon. It's on my To Do list!"

"wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"

Congress never declared war so technically we are not at war. We invaded two countries. What Congress did do was to grant bushco the authority to do whatever was necessary to protect the US. Since there were not limitations (to my knowledge) bushco could do anything, including spying on US citizens.

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I never wrote the latter.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

Which is why I increasingly recoil from treading into the divisive, small minded world of politics where even a thin hair can be split so many ways by all sides. To me, if we send troops, and they kill us and we kill them, that's a war. Now I know there are as many semantics about that as there are about any single Rush Limbaugh comment, but there we have it.

Our politics is too small to do much for us anymore, as I wrote before. We as a whole people have shrunk it down to the least common denominator: me vs. you. I had a Lakota teacher who said if you pick up a stick, you can break it easy. But if you bind together a bunch of sticks, they are so much harder to break. His point was that tribe is more important than any individual. I don't think all the sticks need to be of exactly the same species or length to be bound together. They can be different, but with a common bond. But today, there are hardly any bindings in our country, however loose, that encompass disparate groups. We seem intent on destroying them, and bent on being just with folks "like me."

Entropy is no good for an organized process. We're dying as a nation.

So it comes down to how each individual deals with it. Personally, that's not how I'm constructed, I am more of a "we're all in this together" kind of person, but I have been forced to this viewpoint by the landscape I'm living in.

So, how will potential hard times affect YOU? And what will YOU do?

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

As I recall, the stock market bubble was already starting to burst in 1999 as people realized they were buying stocks on margin for companies that did nothing more than show a bunch of dancing hamsters across the screen. These 22 year old web geniuses, then took their millions and put it in real estate causing the market to follow them into the real estate frenzy.

Right now, it looks like the money is going into dead end energy technologies like hydrogen fuel cells and ethanol.

I believe the problem is a manipulation by the Federal Reserve Bank. There was a nice presentation on C-Span radio the other night about the conspiracy, James Perloff, author, “The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline,” at a John Birch Society event in East Hartford, Connecticut, in January, 2007.

Here's a link to the mp3 podcast if anyone cares to hear it. Interesting stuff about how the great depression was created by the banks to get the government to borrow money from the Federal Reserve. War is also a great way to get the government to borrow billions of dollars. For every dollar that the government borrows, it puts 10 dollars the bank can put in the pipeline to lend other people and make commission on:

http://download.rbn.com/cspan/cspan/...ltway_feed.xml

John Birch Society...eeewww!

Ya know, Bill, I actually think the problem with the "serial bubble" economy is that we have given away the store in terms of manufacturing, so there is no bedrock creation of solid products anymore. Minus that, it seems economic growth can only come from people flocking to the next bubble. There's hardly anyplace where money can be invested in manufacturing with a decent return, the possible exceptions being heavy equipment (John Deere stock would have been nice to own over the past 5 years) and defense.

Beeman raises the "can't do for themselves" factor, which is really quite true of most individuals, and also of our economy now. It can't do for itself, so investors run from one high return-high risk bubble to the next. Of course, the housing bubble was fueled by a government that looked the other way on loan sharking. I know many conservatives say, hey, those folks should have known! But many of the lenders were preying on people of limited economic education, a lot of the loans had fine print clauses that were glossed over in the selling, etc. The lenders would do just about anything to gin up the paper to repackage and resell in the securities markets.

I saw on TV where millions of these ARMs have not even had their rates ratchet up yet...3 million to do so this year, and maybe as many as 5 million next year. The process will continue for at least 5 years. So this isn't going away for awhile.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

It's a good time to remember who owns and controls the money printing press in the USA. The great depression suffered from a severe shortage of circulating currency. My concern is a government under severe debt pressure and a fed up population, resorting to bolstering the economy with a large injection of new dollars. It would make the debt payment to China, etc. easier with cheaper, inflated dollars, but the American public might end up paying $10.00 for a pound of dried beans...Glen

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The more a man travels, acquires wisdom and learns about life, the more likely he is to marry a Country Girl.

Happening now, which is why the dollar is losing value.

This may involve too much naval-gazing, but I have been thinking in the past couple days about how all of life is a parabola. We start out being born, our goals expand through midlife, then begin to refocus in old age, to where they finally come down to just drawing in breath just before we die. Maybe we ought to be like yogis, and go to the drawing in breath part earlier. It generates so much thanks for anything that manifests beyond that!

I can extrapolate that to the economy, where a nation's grand consumer dream may be being reduced to figuring out just what it takes to survive. The stock market today is schizophrenic, following some downbeat surprises in the economic reports. Could the natural process result be a people who can be happy with less, and get off the materialistic treadmill?

Yeah...too much naval-gazing. But just in case, I think I'll till a big garden this year.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

my grandparents said that they couldn't tell any difference when living in the depression as compared to before or after it. they lived in rural tennessee and were dirt poor before, during and after. but they had paid cash for their farm. never had insurance, didn't have electricity until the 50s and had an outhouse until the 80s. always raised their own meat,fruits, vegetables, milk and butter (bought bread and condiments only).

the people who lived in my house in the late 40s live next door. had a hand pump inside, did have electricity but no indoor bathroom.. interesting to see how someone else lived in the same house in a different era. outhouse, wood stove to cook and heat on, boiled water on it to wash clothes or bathe. fireplace but also fuel oil furnace for heat.

on topic: I'd hate to give up my hot water heater and my back isnt capable of chopping wood and fireplace would need work to be safe. I make my living with a paper route and online selling. a depression would probably wipe out both those income streams.

if gas prices go up and discretionary income is hit even harder is what will effect me. unless the paper gave a pay raise for the increased gas prices. online selling already hit by increased prices since I sell collectibles. I'd turn my heat and water heater way down, kill dsl and use only the laptop computer since uses less elec (have two desktops also). probably dig out my 5 inch tv I bought in 1984 to use less elec. build cold frames, plant a bigger garden, and ultimately probably lose these 25 extra pounds I carry around

I guess thinking my life won't change that much. I'm fairly low middle class as it is and in some people eyes maybe poor

This discussion has really brought up a lot of great points. unfortunately most of them are out of the individuals control yet are the ones that will effect us the most. I think this is the most frustrating thing for anyone that attempts even in the smallest ways to do for them selves. We've put too many of our eggs in one basket and we're seeing the results.

People keep going back to the previous "great depression", unfortunately today's world won't react the same. I live in rural TN which wasn't effected much at all during the 30's as the money system wasn't even a big factor as most was done on shres or barter even at that time. There was no electricity or running water in this area until the 40's. In that short time span this area went from Mom's kitchen to McDonalds. You're hard pressed to find many in this area that grow a garden beyond having a tomato plant or 2. My county had mills everywhere, even 2 fine flour mills, now there are none and now no one grows corn or wheat. We had 3 milk processing plants that I know of, we now have none. We are down to 3 dairy farms and in a year or 2 we'll lose another most likely. Most counties east of the Mississippi where population is largest couldn't feed itself for a week. It just goes on and on as we have dismantled our real infrastructure.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

There's another aspect of it, too, and I probably can see this because of time I have spent among American Indian tribes. In the dominant society, there is no "glue" that holds folks together anymore except for money. Stop and think about how many of your relationships have money as a facet, or there would be no relationship. For most Americans, I'd say that's a lot of them.

Now, take money out and folks would have to band together and cooperate more to get it done. I don't know how many times I have read "burned out" posts on this forum, and when it comes right down to it, that's because there is no more neighborly cooperation. It's all based on pay. It is a much harder road to travel to take care of 25-50 or 100 acres on your own than it is if you are helping and getting help from your neighbors.

In my own neighborhood, the older folks used to keep up with who died and send flowers from the community, and who had babies and all. But that older tighter-knit bunch is passing away now, and it is evolving more into a road lined with strangers. I have seen this change in just 17 years there.

I've found in life that everything that happens had a dualistic nature...a positive and negative comes from everything. So the positive that may come from less money is that our society will then depend on it less as a social lubricant, and we may start to help each other more like a tribe. We will again grow closer to each other.

I've never really believed in bootstrapping. No one is an island to themselves, and no one can truly be reliant only on him- or herself, no matter how they try. And I'd submit that it is unnatural for humans to be independent of each other. We're hard-wired to be herd animals and be highly socialized. The whole rugged individualism thing is counter to our nature as a species.

Harder times may bring us closer to our true nature.

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Jim Steele
Sweetpea Farms
"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." -- Robert Gates

Jim S. -- your philosophizing is very interesting reading! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I like your summation --- till a big garden this year.

DH is very anti-social --- so I may have problems with him if/when it comes to needing to be neighborly in order to survive. But I'll work on him.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring - Carl Sagan

The anti social climate of the country is very apparent especially on a board like this. Many move to the "country" to get away from people and be left alone. Shows how we lack in education and many lessons are learned the hard way. Money has fragmented our society starting with families moving long distances apart usually for selfish reasons. Take money out and it's going to be a slow change as we're not fast learners, it will be ugly before people come together.
Even in old rural communities where the old folks used to keep up with each other and be tightly knit, much of that was thru social grouping mainly thru church. Unfortunately because of personalities and money even the churches have fragmented seperating communities furthur.

If you have read this board for any time you can remember posts on here about communal living. You can also remember how quickly the idea is shot down.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

Yep, that is a key change all right. That "glue" used to be the American Family, but that has been dead for a number years.

- We are a mobile society where people will move all the way across the United States for a new job that pays a whopping $15K more per year.

- A selfish society who puts their own WANTS ahead of everything else, including family and friends.

- A society that has no tolerance for people (family and friends) whom they might not share perfectly aligning views. Preferring instead to distance and isolate themselves from said family and friends.

- A society who expects to have perfect harmony between family and friends 100% of the time, else they will take their ball and go play elsewhere, thus further fragmenting the family.

- A society that seems to have reduced the definition of "family" to immediate family only, whereas in the old days "family" not only met immediate family but extended family as well. The extended family is where the real strength of the family originated.

- A society that has made it perfectly clear that the individuals wants are more important than the families needs and wants as a whole.

- A society where the individuals career is more important than the family and the home environment that is present.

- A society that is supremely spoiled and WANTS it all. If you are a homesteader then you want the most land, the perfect land, the idyllic setting, the bestest garden, and no pesky family members around to spoil your perfect homesteading. If you are a city person you want the bestest condo, with the widest screen tv, and no pesky family members around to spoil your perfect suburban living.

- A couple generations who have lived in a very comfortable society for their whole lives, and who have little to no understanding of what was sacrificed to get us where we are today. It is very hard for most people to appreciate that which they have not sacrificed for...

It's always interesting to me to contrast the above with the large population of Asian and Hispanic families we have in our area. Both the Asian and Hispanics are FAR more family oriented and far less individual oriented then the rest of us.

Just a couple of examples I've witnessed.
The Hispanic families in my area make a huge deal over peoples (especially the children) birthdays. It is a huge family gathering for the birthday person, and makes them feel important and part of the family. You better have a good excuse if you miss a family members birthday party because it is an important part of their family culture.

Contrast this with the typical career oriented family where the parents buy an expensive gift for their kid to give to the other kid, then drops the kid off at the party while the parent goes and does something else...

The Asian families take care of their own no matter what, elderly, children, those with health issues, it doesn't matter. They take care of their own BEFORE they worry about what they as an INDIVIDUAL may WANT. They put a very high value on education and it is simply unacceptable for their children to not do well in school. The parents are heavily involved with their children's schooling and transitioning them into the work world as adults. In turn the children are expected to care for the parents as the parents age. It is simply unacceptable to not care for your parents, whatever it takes.

Contrast this with my culture where we get maybe 30% parent involvement in their children's schooling, and we shove our elderly off to homes where some stranger wipes their rear ends...

True. The extended family has broken down. The community has broken down. And even worse, people are completely helpless. They don't know how to improvise, and most people don't even have basic skills like sewing, building fires, and cooking. (throwing hamburger helper in a skillet is NOT cooking).

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