Can you believe that gas is under $2.00 a gallon on average around our country? I’m not sure about you but it was only a few months back that gas actually hit just over $5.00 a gallon during some panic here in Knoxville. The price of gas then rose around the southeast as shortages were rumored. Newscasters, speculators and others were predicting we would never see gas below $3.00 again at that point. In fact they were all saying it could get up to $9.00 a gallon.  Meanwhile the government and everyone are trying to figure out what to do, but nothing was ever done. And now prices appear to be on a free fall. Heck OPEC even cut production rates a few weeks ago to try to cut off the price dropping more and it didn’t work. Gas has gone down another $25 a barrel since the OPEC cuts. And now here we are with gas in Knoxville at $1.67 a gallon. This to me shows me that nobody knows nothin’. I say that for the points I mentioned, mainly everyone was so sure gas would never drop, and it did.

So, with that in mind, look at the current economic situation. Yeah banks failing, companies are using tax payers money to go on retreats, people are flying in on corporate jets begging for money and to quote the band REM “it’s the end of the world and we know it!” But do they really? You see the governments answer to the probelms isn’t to let businesses fail and do that evolution type thing where businesses must adapt, change and grow or they die. Rather lets take billions and billions and billions of dollars which we don’t have and throw them at businesses with poor business models. The models weren’t always bad, but the fact they never update the model as the world happened and changed made them bad.

So I take the threats that the world is coming to an economic end, recessions world wide and major business collapses imminent with a grain of salt. Oh sure some of that might happen but it’s sort of the way the world is supposed to work.

What I find funny is the stock market had the biggest 2 day gains in the last 2 days then it had in many many years, and really the government hasn’t done much of anything except throw money at businesses, of course that was done a long time ago so you know they will take credit when everything starts turning around. “Oh we bailed them out and we saved the world!”

No you dunce, you got our country deeper in debt and the economy worked itself out. It’s like the common cold, yeah you can take a load of drugs including paxil, viagra, flinstone vitamins or other pills that have nothing to do with treating the common cold and within 10-14 business days you’ll be all better. Does that mean the drugs did it? Nope, it’s the body repairing itself, throwing extra crap in the mix really doesn’t help.  But of course the person that gave you the medicine takes the credit.

Anyways, just remember that the people telling us all these bad stories about recession, failures and other chicken little sayings are the same that had no clue about the gas situation but were all 100% certain that prices would forever stay above $3 a gallon and could peak as high as $9…….

And now, a great video I found on youtube -- George Bush perfoms REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”