[Porsche-O-Phile]

I see difficult times ahead. And the warning signs have been there for quite a while.

- A housing market that MUST drop on the order of 50% or so in order to return to anything resembling sustainability

- A weak (and still falling) dollar

- Government that cannot and does not stop spending money it doesn't have

- A generation of people with entitlement complexes demanding government services and benefits they're not entitled to and which the government cannot afford (see above)

- Insatiable energy demand, fueled almost entirely by foreign oil, with few or no legitimate efforts being made to change it

- A negative national savings rate

- An endless multi-billion dollar war in Iraq

- An educational system that has completely failed nationally

- A health care system that is failing nationally

- U.S. manufacturing getting absolutely crushed/decimated by the Chinese and the ensuing trade deficit

- EXTREMELY short-sighted and selfish decision-making processes on the part of most American households (e.g. "screw the gas prices, I want that 7,000-pound SUV that gets 8 MPG because it'll grow my penis")

- A progressively business-unfriendly, over-regulated and restrictive climate in this country, stifling entepreneurship



I can go on, but I don't want this to turn into Monty Python's "I'm So Worried" skit. Point is, there are a lot of very big, very serious problems with no easy or obvious solutions. The empty platitudes spewed forth from (worthless) politicians does little to allay my concerns that a very long, deep period of recession is upon us and will likely not end anytime soon.