The Zero Decade ™ Text stolen from DJCline.com.

I was going through some old receipts saw that exactly eight years ago I paid $1.47 for a gallon of gasoline. Last week I paid $3.57. For those of you keeping track that is more than double what it was. That might be okay if we were all making double what we made in 2000.

Your house may be worth double what it was eight years ago, but I doubt it. Housing prices are headed down to where they were ten years ago. Investing a lot of money in a big house only works if somebody else wants your big house. If you bought or sold a home in the past eight years you probably are losing out on the deal.

Of course you could have invested in the stock market. Adjusting for inflation stocks are worth what they were eight years ago. You would have been better off putting it in an IRA account. The Wall Street Journal called it the Lost Decade for stocks.

Every decade gets a name. There were the Gay Nineties, the Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties. The Seventies were called the Me Decade. I’m calling this the Zero Decade ™. Few of us our going to get out of this decade with anything more than we came in with. It’s been a disaster but the good news is that it will soon be over. We can start saying “twenty ten” instead rattling off “two thousand and eight”. The Teen Decade ™ just sounds more fun.

This is the year of the Rat. A year when things are overturned. Let’s take that to heart and change things.

Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.

Posted by dj in Blumbers, Commentary [981 Views]