I woke up this morning after my wife left for work and turned on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. This is how I start 4 out of 5 weekdays.

The political chit-chat was about Tuesday’s Election races, what it all means, and all this “fill the time” political fluff and puff that is required for these talk shows to stay on the air.

As my political skepticism continued, all of a sudden, they had a breaking news story about Ford….

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — Ford Motor Co. says it made nearly $1 billion in the third quarter, fueled by U.S. market share gains, cost cuts and the government’s Cash for Clunkers rebates.

Without my knowing all the details, I still see this as a victory for the Sink or Swim mentality and economic policy that excludes Federal Government (Taxpayer) Bailouts and Takeovers that have been so controversial the last couple of years.

You and I have limits as to what we can do economically. Those limits are based on our own creativity and abilities, not whether or not the Feds are going to bail us out. And that’s why Ford can hold it’s head high today.

I’m too young to have been around when posters like this one were common place. And my parents who bought US Savings Bonds have passed away, so I can’t ask them. But from the information I have seen, it appears that when our country, our federal government needed more money, in this case to fund our efforts in World War 2, they asked for it and the citizens loaned them the money through the purchase of bonds.

For the past couple of years, decades, we have become numb to big money numbers. In my city there was debate about the spending of just over $1 million dollars to change two blocks of a downtown street from a one way to two way street. And the loudest critics of the project were not the financial conservatives but the folks who were concerned about the removal of trees that lined the street.

When the plans were revealed to the critics that showed how new trees would be included, the majority of the critics quieted down and the project is currently underway.

But what about the money? Perhaps if the media would present the numbers in their full glory, people would understand how much money is being spent by our governments? Which number looks bigger:

$1 million dollars
or
$1,000,000.00

Many people have what I call Money Numbness. We are used to such big numbers that we don’t flinch when we hear about the cost of a house or car that is 5 to 10 times more than they were years ago.

One way we have become Money Numb in those two examples is the use of financing and payments as a guideline for deciding if we can afford it.

“Easy payments of $299″ and then a bunch of fine print and disclaimers are now common in auto ads. As consumers, we have been trained to focus on the affordability of payments instead of the price tag.

This Money Numbness has contributed to Money Dumbness in regards to government spending and government income.

There is only one level of government that has the ability to spend more than it has and that is our federal government. Towns, Cities, Counties & States either have to come up with a balanced budget. They can use loans, bonds, taxes, fees, and whatever else their rules and regulations allow, but they cannot simple print their own money.

The Feds, well, they can do whatever they want. They can commit trillions of dollars that they don’t have to projects that they want to fund.

Let’s do a little comparison of what some of these numbers look like:

$25,000.00 Cost of a new car.
$50,000.00 A decent middle class income
$125,000.00 Cost of a middle class three bedroom home in my neighborhood.
$1,000,000.00 Cost to rebuild two blocks of s downtown city street
$2,000,000,000,000.00 Estimated cost of one of the healthcare reform bills

Let’s look at a Trillion dollars. This is from the website DailyCognition.com:

What ONE TRILLION dollars looks like in dollar bills…

Have you ever though about it. What would 1 trillion dollars look like, layed out in front of you?

I mean, these numbers numbers are tossed around like doggie treats.

So I thought I’d take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

We’ll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently it’s the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation.

Pretty much, everyone has seen a $100 bill. But fewer have owned them.

They’re also guaranteed to make friends wherever you go!

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2″ thick and contains $10,000.

It’s fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000).

You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable.

It fits neatly on a standard pallet…

And $1 BILLION dollars… now we’re really getting somewhere…

Next we’ll look at ONE TRILLION dollars.

This is that number we’ve been hearing about so much.

What is a trillion dollars anyway?

Well, it’s a million million. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a one followed by 12 zeros ($1,000,000,000,000)

You ready for this?

It’s pretty surprising.

(And notice those pallets are double stacked.)

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase “trillion dollars”… that’s what they’re talking about.

That’s a lot of money. And the problem is too many people who want the government to provide various services have no idea that the money to pay for these goods, services, projects, etc, come from the only source the government has for money.

You and me.

Another area of Money Dumbness is that we need tax the companies that are making excessive profits. However, those companies only get their money from one source, You and me as consumers. So, raising taxes in this manner, means more money that comes out of our monthly budgets.

I don’t have an easy answer to this. But if we can educate those that are either Numb or Dumb, we may at least be headed in a better direction.

Over the weekend, I saw Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story. As I was watching the story of political corruption, greed and excess, I saw many things I agreed with.

And Michael Moore appeared to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans in the film.

During the past 24 hours I watched last weeks interview with Sean Hannity and it solidified my negative opinion of Mr. Hannity. You can watch these interviews by going here.

I also read the story of Lunsford Richardson whose name you probably don’t recognize, as much as you would the product he invented, Vicks Vapor Rub. Click here to read it for yourself.

At the end of the movie, I was hoping that Michael Moore would NOT say that the answer was Socialism, which is what he is accused of saying. No, what Mr. Moore says is Democracy is the answer. Check it out and see for yourself.

My wife and I have some very opposite political views. This is not new information for either of us, but it does create some interesting and sometimes heated conversations.

Both of us have friends that lean left and friends that lean right. And the danger is to pigeon hole folks who have conservative ideas as right wing extremists, which is just as dangerous as pigeon holing folks with liberal ideas as left wing extremists.

Politics is a game of compromise and often contradiction. I have contradictions in my own life and I’m sure you do to.

With the media focusing on the radicals on both the left and the right, please don’t lump your friends with different viewpoints into the radical camps on either side. If you want to have an impact, then have a conversation and explore the issues with an open mind, even if you have your own strong beliefs and convictions.

Recent elections have been won by the votes cast by the mainstream voters, not the radicals.

Setting aside the legalities of this whole debate for a moment, I found this presentation very good..

It is now the second full week of August and to the displeasure of our President and his friends in Congress, a health care reform package was not passed before their August recess.  So as our representatives return from Washington and hold meetings with those that voted them into office, some are feeling the heat from angry citizens.

What are they angry about?  Is this passion falsely manufactured by right wing radicals who are against any and everything that our President is for?

Or is that an unfair characterization by some of cable news show hosts?

The problem is that we may never know because unlike the days of Walter Cronkite who passed away recently, there is no unbiased slant to any of the news anymore.

Uncle Walter was the most trusted man in journalism due to his seemingly unbiased, straight forward reporting of what was going on in our world.

I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s and along with Walter Cronkite, another non-partisan face on television every night was Johnny Carson who hosted the Tonight Show before Conan and Jay.

The Carson version of the Tonight Show did not rely on political humor to entertain us, and millions of late night viewers watched Johnny.  It wasn’t until he retired and turned over the show to Jay Leno that there was any real competition for a late night variety show. Johnny, like Walter, were the Kings.

And while I do not pretend to know the answers, I do have a reliable measuring stick to use when I want to see if our federal government is doing what they should be doing or if they are overstepping.

You have that same measuring stick, the Constitution, which I urge you to read before you jump into the mess of political talk that seems to dominate conversations these days.

What I want is not another Walter Cronkite or Johnny Carson, but elected officials that we can trust to follow the laws that they are sworn to protect.  And unless you and I know what that foundation is, we can not judge them.  Let’s do our homework.

A lot has happened since I added anything to this blog. We’ve had General Motors and Chrysler go belly up, David Letterman has insulted Sarah Palin (again), and I am back from a week long trip to Maine and back.

The focus of our trip was my son’s graduation from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine at 2pm on Saturday. Josh is the first guy on my side of the family to complete a degree and in 2 or 3 generations that I’m aware of.

I believe in pursuing your passions and often a college degree is required to gain entry into a profession these days. And I am very proud of Josh for completing this stage of his life. Also, if I was pursuing a degree, I would consider College of the Atlantic for myself.

I saw some things I didn’t care for, the liberalization of philosophy, but I am secure in my own beliefs. What concerns me more is the state of our education system in this country overall.

I grew up attending public schools in the 1960’s thru mid 70’s. My education was good and decent. My high school years were at a local Lutheran High School, only because of race riots that were disrupting the public high schools at the time.

These days there are debates about funding education, results of education, test results, etc. Today, as I was going through my email and saw this from Seth Godin which points out another problem and solution. Because we need to understand the reason behind the formal education should be to prepare people for real life, whatever direction that life may lead them.

No matter how much formal education you pay for, please keep learning and reflecting on all that life gives you. Pursue the passions and rise above the politics that can color viewpoints.

Here’s Seth:

Textbook rant

I’ve spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I’m assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I’m interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.

As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.

They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That’s what makes it standard. It’s hard, but it shouldn’t make you a millionaire.

They don’t make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.

They’re out of date and don’t match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.

They don’t sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, “yes, this is what I want to do!”

They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.

In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it’s foolish to give me definitions to memorize. Where is the context? When I want to teach someone marketing (and I do, all the time) I never present the information in the way a textbook does. I’ve never seen a single blog post that says, “wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!”

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it’s part of their job, remember?)  When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you’re done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

I have been politically quiet for the past couple of months.  Not because I don’t care, but because I want to listen, watch and observe.

I have taken a break from most of the media that was feeding their biased views on cable TV and talk radio simply because it is tiring to listen to.

So, I continue and focus on what I can do to make a difference.  And that is involvement in my own community and conversations with friends and associates.  I always want to dig deeper and find out why people have the views they have.  If you click on the tab that answers the question “What’s this Blog about”,  you’ll notice that one of the first items I point out is that we are all filled with contradictions in our lives.

I’ve also learned over my 40+ years that by listening and understanding the other viewpoint, you can dialogue and perhaps change someones view.   And unlike the cartoon in a previous post on this blog, people really want substance behind the words hope and change.

I encourage you to take positive action, to have an impact on your community and the folks that are watching you, I see it occurring in my family and friends and I know it is making a difference.

I’m really tired of the political talk on radio & TV.  I turned it off last week and started listening to music again.  Which is too bad, because, I’ve listened to talk on the radio for the last 20 years.

This past weekend, I spent 3 great hours with my daughter talking about a little of everything including health care and other issues.

The answers will come from conversations where one listens and the other talks, and then you go back and forth without trying to convince the other that they are an idiot.  Now it takes 2 to play fair and that’s not always easy.  But if you really listen and really talk, instead of argue and attack, then we can move forward.

That’s why I generally stay out of politics.

One other thought, you have contradictions just like I do.  And instead of focusing on the areas we disagree with, start with the areas we have in common.  It helps the conversational process and the answers will come as the ideas flow.

Do you only listen to those that you agree with?  Then get out and learn about the other sides.  And have a real reason for taking a stand based on facts, not just emotion.

Now, it’s back to the tunes for awhile.

President Obama won the Presidential Election by focusing on 2 words that people were hungering for.

Change was one.  But everyone was using that word.  So you have to look at the other word too.

Hope was the word that really inspired people.

The problem is that such a tiny minority know the basics of our Federal Government.

Like:

1. What are the three branches of Government?
2. How is the difference between a Senator and a Representative?
3. Can you name all  of your own elected officials from President on down to local government leaders?

I could go on, but you get the picture.  And it’s not pretty for those of us that want a government that follows the constitution.

So, what can you and I do?

You need to give Hope and Change in your message AND pair it with policies that are constitutionally correct.   That’s the kind of Change that we need. And that gives hope…