Terry Lynne Hale

Practicing the Art of Perseverance

A New Year – Solutions? Or At Least, A Refreshed Attitude

by | Jan 3, 2022 | Consumer Awareness, Fiction, Non-Fiction, the Internet, Writing

Do you know how when you get some time off, you plan to knock out some incomplete projects around your house or in your office, etc.?

This unfinished business can also be called an Energy Suck. These are things you really need to do but put off over and over – the very fact of their existence sucks the energy right out of you. Have you been there?

Anyway, as I attempted to clean out old files during some time off this holiday season, I came upon a 2009 email from a sister who lives in Florida. I got a kick out of it!

She wrote “This was an article from the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?” She continued “I thought this was the BEST idea. I think this guy nailed it”

“Dear Mr. President,

PATRIOTIC RETIREMENT

There are about 40 million people over the age of 50 in the work force; pay them each $1 million in severance with three stipulations:

  1. They leave their jobs. 40 million job openings- Unemployment fixed.
  2. The buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.
  3. They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.

Snopes and several other publications got into the fray on this subject back then with Snopes rating it “MIXED” and several astute mathematicians interjected the hard cold facts that this plan would not work, and the numbers were way off. Instead of costing $40 billion, this plan would cost over $40 trillion, which at that time was estimated to be at least 4 times the national debt. (That may have been an inaccurate estimate as well.)

So, today on this second day of January 2022, I decided to try to find more on this article. Turns out ten years and one day ago, the St. Petersburg Times newspaper became the Tampa Bay Times. It had a good run from 1921 to 2011. Interesting tidbit.

https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/history/2021/12/31/a-decade-ago-the-st-petersburg-times-became-the-tampa-bay-times/

Writing this post took me down a rabbit hole of sorts reading all these “facts and figures” with a reliability factor of unknown origin.

I am exhausted.

As a fan of The X Files, I know, deep in my heart, that The Truth Is Out There.

I just have not found it – YET.