“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people”--Wendell Phillips He said a mouthful. Yesterday the Merle Sneed blog reached it's 20,000th visitor. Imagine that, 20,000 folks with too much time on their hands. who knew? My milestone visitor was not one of the many friends that I have made in the blogging community, but instead was a visitor from South Korea, who found me by Googling "Sticks and stones may break my bones". There must have been a good reason, don't you think? Hopefully, I was of some help to him or her. As I mentioned just a few days ago, three of my former coworkers at Tedious Systems, came in Friday morning and were called into a meeting where they were given cardboard boxes and told to clean out their desks and hit the road. These were good high-paying jobs, which cannot be replicated, at least in Hooterville, the minimum wage capital of the country. These people will all get a decent severance, but if you are living paycheck to paycheck anyway, as two of these folks were, that just postpones the pain for a few months. Now everyone a Tedious is assuming the worst is yet to come for them. And the tough times are not limited to thse who are worried about their jobs. My dearest friend in the world has lost 35% of the value in his IRA account and has to take out money every month to live. If the market just stays flat from here, he will be down 40% for the year. The problem is, when you lose 40% one year, you have a smaller base to grow from, so it takes a 67% increase to get back to where you were. With the seven percent he will have to take out next year, the problem becomes even more severe. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky