How Bad Are Things in California?

[Dizaster]

Well it's gotten pretty bad.

Lot's of businesses closing down, lot's of jobs being cut, things are getting expensive more and more by the hour.

I'm in the Aerospace/Military/Commercial line of work thus far has not seen any effects. However with Obamas plan to shut down the military/war during his term I'm sure we'll see some effect.

My girls in the real estate business, she's not a real estate agent but her business has taken a BIG hit for the past 7-8 moths. It's gotten really bad at times where she'll only have 1 maybe 2 transactions a month when on the norm she would have about 9-12 transcations.

That's cool.. My brother lives in Cali as well and works in Aerospace at NASA, he study engineering theory and specializes in helicopter flight and guidance systems... The same for him, he hasn't mentioned any sort of instability in that industry, but his wife is a little more unsafe...

[boozeboxer]

DId you all see that Caterpillar was firing 20,000 people. THat is a shit load, and considering the sector they are in: this is very bad long term news for us! That means that all construction of any magnitude globally is not going to be happening for a few years....... (I would guess)

[CutMeMick]

Starbucks is planning on closing down locations and laying off people any day now.

[Dizaster]

It sux that while everything is prosperous, they pocket their profits.. When times get tough, instead of dipping into that profit a little bit to feed back in to the business and support the staff, they just fire a bunch of people to protect their horded profits... That is the sad part, use the workers to make money, fire the workers to keep the money... That's the one and only HUGE problem with the system that makes it suck, none of the boardmembers or mega rich are prepared to give up any of their stash to keep people employed and keep a business on it's scale until economic bumps are ridden out... They keep it safe, and fire who they will to make sure not a cent of it leaves their pocket... The funny thing is, it's all that money they have hidden away instead of it being put back into the economy that is the reason the economy crashes..


In fact in my other thread I had the figures wrong.. I said that top 1% has more than the other 50% of wealth.. That's wrong.. The top 1% has more than the other 90%!! If that money was in the hands of the 90%, it would be being spent.. Instead it's in the hands of the 1% who have it kept away, growing and growing exponentially without it ever actually materially benifiting the cycle of things..

The most unbelievable of all the figures is the richest 400 families in America, ONLY 400 families, own 1.4 trillion dollars!!! Even a portion of that pumped back into spending and ecomony would do wonders...

In times of desperation, the mega rich should give up some of their wealth to support workers that helped make them the money in the first place.. So their wealth will go from 10 billion to 8 billion, they have done a GREAT thing for 1000's of people, and it helps the economy get back onto it's feet.. But how many people of you heard of that get to the top and are prepared to do that?

[CutMeMick]

Also not sure if you guys read or saw this on the news but it so happens that we might get IOUs from the state this year for our tax refunds.

Wonder if my girl (who usually pays) can do the same and send them an IOU?

[X]

Starbucks is planning on closing down locations and laying off people any day now.

Oh, it's not all bad then. A ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy day

If there will be one good thing to come out of all this it'll be people realising that more than 15 pence for a cup of water with the faintest aroma of coffee in it might just not be worthwhile. No amount of pretentious shitty names for the same product will be able to disguise it.

[luvfightgame]

I am in the construction industry and my business went in the toilet 2 years ago. About the same time I started working for banks on foreclosed properties. Now I am busier than ever. It's really sad but it's terrible and going to get MUCH worse. I know the numbers for projected foreclosures and this is from the drop off 2 years ago. The people going out of work, and businesses shutting down now will hit in the next 1-2 years and there's more now than then. It's dominoes and it's gonna be really ugly and take a long time to recover, don't believe the hype about a recession. We are 2 years into a recession not 1 and we are entering a depression.

It will be nation wide also. We are soon to have some food shortages due to lending issues and crop insurance for farmers. Also they lost alot of crops last year because of rain and a propane shortage in the farming states at harvest time. We are in for hard times.

Unfortunately our supposedly elected leaders are making the problem worse rather than fixing it. Instead of addressing and fixing the problems they are putting duct tape on it again and it's not gonna hold. We still have the baby boomer retirement problem which will bk social security in less than a year and the baby boomers losing half their retirement money from the stock crash, forcing them to work longer, keeping the jobless rate higher. It's bad news.

By the way Cali is broke. We are getting IOU's for tax returns and they need to find 20 billion in the next month.

[Trainer Monkey]

Here's how bad its gotten,state employees have started recieving IOU's instead of their normal paycheck

[CutMeMick]

Well I just read today that Boeing is laying off some 4,500 employees.
Ouch... So much for the Aerospace business being in the clear.