Our Shrinking Economy
When I heard Warren Buffett say, "the pie is always growing," I thought to myself, "your pie is always growing." The middle-class economy has been shrinking for decades. The newspapers only tell us the Dow Jones Average or the S&P 500 or the GDP is increasing.
While running for the local school board in 2010 I ran across this included chart that shows the decline in average disposable income from 33% income to less than 2% over 40 years.
In my campaign I said we need to reduce the emphasis on teaching science and increase emphasis on teaching economics and finance.
Our children who are currently graduating from colleges and universities are having trouble finding jobs. We think it is just a temporary down-turn, but I believe there has also been a steady decline in jobs for the middle-class, a decline that has been going on for decades and has been hushed-up by the papers in the same way the local papers hush-up the decline in Plano schools.
Reliable and Useful Economic Data
The state of Texas needs to accumulate and analyze economic data so we are not dependent on the federal government for economic data and forecasting. After Greenspan let us down, we cannot rely on the Federal Reserve nor on the federal government for economic assessments.
We need data so we can understand what is happening and so we can spot opportunities. We need to be able to devise defensive financial strategies and to spot opportunities for growth.
Foreign Investment
We need data to help us plan investment opportunities for foreign capital to invest in Texas and in our neighboring states. We need data to help us plan capital investment into factories or into export businesses.
Our national economy is a wreck because Wall Street bankers could not or would not find capital investments in American factories for foreign capital. Instead, Wall Street bankers diverted foreign capital into Collateralized Debt Obligations.
If Wall Street bankers will not find good opportunities for foreign investors, then Texans must do so. For the sake of our children's future and the future of the world economy, Texans must do a better job creating good investment opportunities that lead to job creation in Texas.
If Texans fail to develop good investments, then eventually no one in international banking will want U.S. dollars, the dollar will plunge in value, and we will all be ruined. But if we succeed, then Texas will drive the American economy and our children, as well as the whole nation, will prosper.
Robert Canright
