William's expert opinion on the current Economy

I'm qualified to discuss the economy because I have been working since I was 11 years old and have had all sorts of jobs. Before i start explaining how we got into this mess, I guess I should go over my qualifications (i.e. "job history")

Mowing grass for my Dad - 9 years old
Twenty five cents for the front, fifty cents for the back. We had an electric lawnmower and I used to cut the cord everytime I mowed. After a while, the cord was nothing but one big long wrap of black electrical tape.

Paper Route - 11 yrs. I rode my bike about 3 miles down to the paper office every afternoon, folded my papers ,put rubber bands on them, then rode 3 miles back to my route area, threw the papers on the driveway except for the turds that had to have special treatment (in their carport). Once a month I had to go to every single house and beg these people for money. Some of them never wanted to pay me, they just said to come back later. Folks, let's keep in mind that the bill was like 2 dollars or something. I wish I could go back in time and tell those people "Sure, I'll come back later, and in the meantime, why don't you shove this paper right up your ass".
I made about 27 cents a week i think at this job. Seemed ok to me.

Folding newspapers at night - 12 yrs
My dad got me and my brother Robert jobs folding newspapers two nights a week. The boss was this huge guy with big arms and he had a smoke in the corner of his mouth all night. He was really nice and usually gave us a quarter or so extra. We worked from like 7pm to 10 pm. We didn't have a lot of money back then so cash was more important than homework. One night we were loading the papers in the back of a big semi truck, I jumped up and grabbed the strap on the back roll up door, my friend grabbed my legs and pulled me down as a joke. Would have been funny if my finger would have not got smashed under the door when it hit the deck. Broke a bunch of bones in one finger. My friend was terribly upset but I thought it was cool to be able to ride to the hospital and stuff.

Bussboy 13 yrs
Disgusting work for a dollar an hour. There was this old black guy that worked in the kitchen. His hands were like leather, and for good reason; for a dollar he would stick his hand in the hot frying grease.

Kitchen work at Pizza Inn - 14 yrs
Lots of fun because friends worked there and Pizza Inn is the best pizza in the world. We used to go up in the attic and peek through the vent in the woman's bathroom. Did we know how to have fun or what! I was never allowed to work up front making pizza's by the window because i was too ugly. I had bad complexion and an atrocious haircut. no kidding, this was the real reason. I always felt depressed about that.

Slave at an Apartment complex.
Cleaning out the pool, weeding in the broiling sun, mowing, and cleaning out disgusting apartments after people moved out. The bathrooms were sometimes so vile that we had to wear masks to keep from puking. no kidding. Once ,the leadman ("buddy") and I were way out in a field sawing up big limbs and hauling off in the broiling sun of course. This is very miserable work, we were soaking from sweat, so buddy instructed me to go get two cokes. I walked a long way and found that the only drinks in the machine were "tab", a foul diet drink. I returned. "Where are the cokes?" "All they had was Tab". "YOU IDIOT, I'D A DRANK A DAMNED TAB!!!". I was really pathetic back then. The bitchy-ass lady that ran the place hated me because I was "always wasting time fooling with the lawnmower.

Catching Chickens
Similar to the scene in Napoleon Dynamite. We would go inside a chicken house where thousands of chickens were running around loose in random fashion. We had to lean over and pick up 5 or 6 at a time by their legs, bring them to a table where a guy would vaccinate them and then toss them to the other side of the table. Feathers everywhere and chickshit and all that. I think we made about 2 dollars an hour. For lunch we would go to a convience store and buy potted meat and crackers to eat.

Grocery Store Clerk
I had to wear an orange vest and a brown clip-on tie. This job provided good exercise; I had to sweep and mop 100,000 square feet every night. One night I was straightening shelves and found a cantaloupe in the tupperware plastic bowl section. I did not feel like walking all the way to the produce end of the store so i just put it inside a plastic bowl and snapped on the lid.
I forgot all about it until a couple of weeks later so I went to get it. I popped the lid off and saw the most frightening site you can imagine. The canteloupe was now a moving ball of a million bugs. It had completely been replaced by maggots. I yelled and threw it back on the shelf. I have no idea what ever became of it.

Deckhand on an offshore diving boat. - 16 yrs
This was my most pathetic attempt to earn money in my entire life. I thought i could be all big and tough like the roughneck guys in my hometown so I got a friend to get me on as a deckhand.
The first night I got so seasick that I could not get out of bed until about noon. What a great start. After two weeks at sea I headed home and never went back.

Picking up trash on the ground on construction sites
Self explanatory

T.V. Repairman
This was a great job, lots of electronics and such. On my first day my boss was showing me around the inside of a TV so I could get used to how it worked. I saw this cool looking round disk looking thing, pointed to it and said "what's th...AHHH!!!!!". My boss with his ever-present pipe in his mouth, simply uttered a muffled chuckle "hmmff ff ff". "That's a tripler, it takes eight thousand volts in and turns it into twenty four thousand volts". All I know is that it pulled an arc about 2 inches long to my finger and my arm was numb for a week. A really upsetting thing happened one day while me and the other tech were doing a house call (yes, house calls). Robert was behind the TV working and all of the sudden I heard him thump to the floor. I jumped back there and saw him shaking violently. He was foaming at the mouth and his eyes were white and fluttering. I called my boss in a panic. "He's having a seizure, it will last about 5 minutes and then he will calm down, but he will be in a fog, not know who you are, and will not talk". It happened exactly that way. Back at the shop Robert continued to work, but did not know who we were until a few hours later and then he was fine.

TK Valve - sweeping and then building things
I was in college majoring in Industrial Technology and wanted to get a job in the field so I went to this valve manufacturing plant to try to get some work. They said they did not have any openings. I said I would take anything they had. "All I have is a third shift floor sweeper". I took it. Never be afraid to work your way up I was taught. Well, after a week they let me start moving pallets of big metal valves around and stacking them on these big tall racks. I picked up the first pallet, pushed some levers and raised it up about 12 feet and started to slid it into the rack. Well, they don't teach forklift driving in school so I was not highly proficient. I rammed the pallet into the edge of the rack and the whole thing came crashing down. Five hundred pounds of metal parts hitting concrete. The shop foreman was standing right there and just walked away with a disgusted look on his face. He never liked me because I was a "college boy". After a few more weeks i was put in the testing department designing and building fluid test systems. And they never let me drive a forklift again, haha.


So, here is my opinion of the economy:
It's your fault. There is a very simple rule that nobody has been following for a couple of decades now...
"Spend less than you make"
If we had all followed this rule, banks would not have been making toxic loans, detroit would have scaled back 20 years ago and be small and healthy now, our trade deficit would be ok, a few thousand strip malls would have never been built (and thus have no need to close), and we would live in reasonably sized houses that we can make payments on.

that's it. simple, huh?