They called it the Dust Bowl: five years of drought that ravaged farms across the Great Plains states, and literally blew millions of tons of top soil into the air. Ships 300 miles off of the east coast of the United States reported the dirt being blown onto their decks from these dust storms, and turning to mud with the ocean’s spray. Dust storms were so enormous in those days that there were days when the dirt in the air literally blocked out the sun from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast. (Read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for a feel of the desperation of the era.)

The lessons learned from those five hard years of drought reshaped the way farming was conducted in the Great Plains from that point forward. Too much of the prairie grass had been plowed under to control wind erosion and to hold moisture in the soil. While the U.S. economy demanded more food production, the Great Plains were overworked and over-grazed. The basics of land management were violated and when the storms blew in during the spring of 1934 (as they do every year in the Great Plains), there was nothing to hold the soil to the ground. It just all blew away. 

Let me just warn you before you read any further, if you don’t like political criticism, you should stop reading now. If you have bought into the notion that we are bounding along the road to an economic recovery at breakneck speed, you may be offended by what I have to say. It seems to me that we are living in times when the basics of good business sense have been violated and we are in the midst of our own dust bowl. Every once in a while we get a warning that the times we live in are not what they should be. For instance, last August, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States from the AAA rating it had held for 70 years. It has yet to turn that report around and upgrade us again. There is too much debt on the books. The obligations of the federal government are outstripping its ability to pay them. Our federal electorate ignored the warnings and continued to spend borrowed money with promises to spend more on entitlements. In other words, they continue to plow under the grass and watch the wind blow the soil right from under their feet as they do it, but ignore the fact that the more they plow, the worse it gets. We are in an election year when this very issue should be at the heart of the debate. The fact that we keep getting off track into side issues – most of which I believe are conjured up in some back room to keep our eye off of the dust storm around us - indicates either we have politicians who do not understand the real crisis we are in or are willingly attempting to dupe the electorate to get elected. I suspect both are equally true. It concerns me that we are following a European model of governmental spending when the once great economy of Europe is in shambles and those who tried to infuse some fiscal restraint into the system were voted out of office. The U.S. election of 2012 has to be about restoring the basics of good business practice back into the way we do commerce in the U.S. Namely, we have to control spending to line up with our income (a.k.a balancing the budget.) We have to pay down our debts. We have to quit doling out money to every special interest group with their hand out. Learn how to simply say "no.” We have to quit making promises we simply cannot keep. Don’t let the rhetoric fool you. If you raise taxes on the rich, you still won’t have enough money to pay for the spending that has happened over the past four months! Let me explain. According to Forbes magazine, the net worth of all the billionaires living in the U.S. is a cumulative $1.6 trillion. This list includes a diversity of business innovators, their companies and products. On January 1, 2012, if you had cashed them all out – I mean take every penny each of them have accumulated over a lifetime – and had put them out on the street, penniless, taken all their wealth and applied it to the federal spending, the money would have lasted until about 9:30 a.m. on April 3! If you were to apply the money to the national debt – over and above what we spend each year – you would need ten times as much money as the billionaires have accumulated! So where are you going to turn when the richest of the rich are broke?

What does this have to do with you and me? Eventually someone has to pay for all of this. That is where this will impact your employment and mine. The more talk there is of squeezing money out of the people who employ others (a.k.a. the rich), there will be continued unemployment. The longer the unemployment rate stays high, the less working individuals there are to pay for all of this. The longer it goes, the more burdens there are on businesses to pay more in taxes. The more they pay, the less there is to go around for new jobs and small businesses that support larger industries. I have seen many good friends lose their businesses over the past four years. It is more than just a correction in the economy; it is the undoing of some business basics that has stirred all of this up. And it is time to focus on real changes that will get us back to basic business. It is time to take a close look at who occupies the White House, the Congress, who our governor will be, who the mayor will be, and so on. It is time for more than change; it is time for sound, responsible leadership.

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May 11, 1934: Dust storm sweeps from Great Plains across Eastern states, This Day in History, History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dust-storm-sweeps-from-great-plains-across-eastern-states

S&P downgrades U.S. credit rating for first time, by Zachary A. Goldfarb, The Washington Post, August 5, 2011

The World’s Billionaires, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/billionaires

Total Budgeted Government Spending 2012 http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_2012

U.S Debt Clock, http://www.usdebtclock.org