Travis Seitler: Web Designer

If you’re on Twitter, post your answer there and include the #ifelected hashtag. I’ve got a few in there already, but it’d be more fun if somebody else was playing with me! Make it funny, serious and/or insightful… just don’t be bland. (And make sure you’re following hashtag on Twitter if you want yours included in their index.)

Anybody who’s trying to get a handle on the current economic free-for-all should check out The Real Great Depression, which does a great job explaining how the depression of 1873 mostly happened because too many banks approved too many bad mortgages in the commercial real estate sector, and so it’s a better analog to what we’re seeing today.

More generally, the Ludwig von Mises Institute put together a collection of articles to help you understand the bailout and everything related to it (Freddie Mac, short-selling, etc.). Lew Rockwell put together a similar collection of “I told you so” articles.

If I had a gold-based salary (rather than U.S. Dollar-based), I’d be doing quite well now.

I just ran the numbers, and sheesh! When I started working full-time as a web designer, my beginning salary was $25k/yr. At the time, gold was trading at $280US/oz., so if I’d been paid in gold, I would have been working for 89.29oz/yr.

Fast-forward to November 2007: the U.S. Dollar has become so devalued (primarily due to the never-ending Federal Reserve printing presses—we’ve got to fund the troops somehow, and that somehow is by printing more FR notes) that if we take that hypothetical “gold-standard salary” and convert it into today’s U.S. Dollar, you end up with $71,500/yr.

Let me say that again: $25,000 in May 2000 equals $71,500 in November 2007.

Somehow those raises don’t seem so much like raises anymore.

Until we move to PA, I’m working an earlier schedule at Gemstone so that I can get home at a decent hour (meaning before Joshua goes to sleep for the night). Because of that, I’ve been getting up at 6:30am; not incredibly early, but I had been used to getting into work at 9:30.

Alarm clock goes off at 6:30 this morning. I hit the button to turn it off… and go back to sleep. Thankfully I woke up only fifteen minutes later, but it still threw my morning routine out of whack. I try to get ready and out the door in a decent amount of time, but it never really works. I’m tying my necktie when I look up at the clock and realize I’m already a half-hour late.

I grab my lunch, give Nicole and Joshua kisses (Katie got some earlier; we’re trying to train her to stay in bed ’till 8am so Mama doesn’t have to hit the ground running), and I’m out the door. Nicole reminds me (granted, she had told me the night before and as the daily commuter it was my fault anyway) that the car was on empty. And oh yeah, it’s raining and generally miserable outside. I try to suck it up and just head off to work—er, I mean the gas station.

Pull up to the cheapest station in the area, wondering why $3.02/gal sounds like a bargain to me. Get out to pump, and I realize the pump’s overhang isn’t going to keep the rain off of me; it’s really just going to pool the rain into bigger drops. Unscrew the gas cap, hit the “CREDIT OUTSIDE” button, reach for my wallet…

…where’s my wallet?

…

I DON’T @%$%$ BELIEVE IT. I LEFT THE @&!!& WALLET AT THE HOUSE?!

…

Screw the gas cap back on. Sheepishly climb back into the car. Wonder who in this busy station (cheapest in the area, remember?) is watching my strange behavior. Meanwhile, those minutes just keep ticking by. I consider leaving the car running while I buzz the entrance and have Nicole meet me with my wallet, but it’s so late now that I might as well forget about getting into the office early anyway.

I walk in the door and I’m greeted by Katie. I knew she’d be up, though; it’s already a quarter past eight. Nicole asks what’s wrong, I tell her about the wallet, and then… she and Katie sit me down on the couch for hugs and snuggles.

I tell ya, I walked out that door with a little spring in my step and Dido’s Thank You playing in my head.

“And even if my house falls down now, I wouldn’t have a clue…”

Lousy weather, high gas prices, being late for work, forgetting your wallet… how tough can those things be if a couple of hugs can best ‘em all, hands down?