There will be many convincing arguments made during the year that one day soon the sun will no longer rise. Talking heads and experts with lots of charts and tons of data will show this to be true. My only prediction is the sun will continue to rise each morning despite all this.
This.
Standard and Poor's raised Greece's credit rating last month.
Greece. Remember Greece? Didn't some people predict Greece would vanish in a puff of smoke? Even today I read someone trying to make some silly connection between the US and Greece with Greece in their analogy representing a place where the sun doesn't come up, people don't make love anymore, there aren't any children playing, etc. A bunch of babies were born in Greece yesterday, which indicates to me that even in the depth of its fiscal crises people still make love. Life goes on.
Now to be fair: (A) We don't want to face Greece's problems, but Greece actually has problems to face rather than being a non-entity - rather than being a place where zombies pick at mud for sustenance as some people try to make it sound. And (B) There are places in the world that aren't much better than a place where zombies pick at mud for sustenance, but the US (at least) isn't heading in
that direction. There are proprietary priorities in various directions that challenge the US in various ways, but those pressures will literally vanish long before we ever get anywhere close to the depths of hell. The US simply has far too much going for it that these hellish places simply don't have.
I do have worries... (A) I worry about not having enough money to live comfortably in retirement until my hopefully peaceful death at an age high enough that I feel that I lived a full life and at an age low enough that I don't feel that my body has outstayed its welcome. (B) I worry about how I've been crafted by society to live a certain way that may end up taking too much away from those who come after me. (C) I worry about not leaving what I feel is a rather meaningless rat race experience behind long enough before I die to give me the chance to reinvent myself (a third time) to become what I need to in order to live a satisfying, fulfilling, vital retirement, and I worry about being successful in that reinvention.
So I do have worries... but I also realize that even in the worst cases of those three sets of scenarios, the first of the three - the money scenario - is the least of my concerns. There are people who live on Social Security. I don't know how, but they do. Maybe I'm being naive but I really don't see this country getting to the point, within any foreseeable future, where people like me will be found dead on the streets each morning - dead from starvation, exposure, etc. Indeed, the only vector I see as a major challenge for our nation right now is precluding people dying unnecessarily early due to inadequate health care - everything else is just noise - everything else I see our society working toward (financially) are just trivial optimizations to foster luxury, rather than anything addressing basic needs necessary to live a satisfying(-enough) life.
The sun rose again today. As long as we can eventually address the high cost of health care, or at least keep poking at it so that the situation doesn't turn critical, then I'm sure the sun will rise again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
