blog.milesfranklin.com / By David Schectman / February 8th, 2013
Yesterday afternoon, Susan and I went to see Zero Dark Thirty. We loved the movie. It’s amazing what the affect of just ONE dedicated person can be. One never-say-die lady was responsible for finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Every one of us can make a difference.
After the movie, we had dinner with David Young, a musician friend we met here in Miami last year. Somehow the conversation turned to the economy and he said, “I am a pretty good judge of the economy. Last year I traveled to a different city on 40 weekends. Business is way off, and has been falling for a long time.”
David sells spiritual music that he plays on the flute, the kind you would hear in a SPA or elevator. He produces his own CDs and he sells them at art shows and to small retailers. He has witnessed, first hand, the decline of the “small business” in America. He used to sell to 3,000 small shops and now he has less than 100. These small businesses were the backbone of the US economy, so he is keenly aware of the decline of our Middle Class. He met Harry Dent on a cruise and was impressed with what he had to say.
That’s when the discussion got interesting.
For those of you who don’t know much about Harry Dent, he also talks about the collapse of the Middle Class, and America, but he says that we are heading toward a deflationary collapse, and therefore he says the best protection is to stay invested in the U. S. dollar. (In a Depression, cash is king)
I told David Young that I agreed that the Middle Class has been decimated. Susan and I both experienced it first-hand, back in the mid-70s. Susan was a rep for several women’s clothing lines and she traveled Minnesota, Iowa, western Wisconsin and North Dakota. Her accounts were small rural specialty shops. One by one, those small rural specialty shops closed their doors. They were being run out of business by a new breed of competition; the discount store. Target, Wal-Mart and Kmart were taking away their customers.
