THE “FISCAL CLIFF” – OPPORTUNITY OR CRISIS?

As I write this Blog, it’s January 11, 2013 and THERE IS a Washington resolution to the “Fiscal Cliff”.   

OR MAYBE NOT, depending upon the point of view of which ‘expert’ is being interviewed and by whom.  

I live in a world (the ‘real’ world) where I am always trying to find money for resident groups to buy their mobile home parks.  

Sooooo, I think about the impact of national fiscal issues — on the folks I deal with who want to buy their park, on owners of parks and the likelihood that they will want to sell to the residents, and on the economy in general.

But trying to guess the impact is impossible, for lots of reasons you already know.

OPPORTUNITY

So I choose to view the future as an OPPORTUNITY.

I have given up trying to understand the Feds and I take guidance from Dave Barry, the humor columnist for a Miami, Fl newspaper, (and I quote):

“The federal government has become gigantic, unbelievably expensive, insanely complicated and absurdly bossy.  Yet often this same government is sincerely trying, in its clumsy federal way, to do the right thing, to help us, much as King Kong sincerely believed he was helping Fay Wray when he carried her against her will up the Empire State Building.”
“And so we must now ask ourselves: Can this system be fixed? Can we, the people … bring about meaningful reform . . . No, we can’t.”
“So instead, we should learn to view the federal government as ENTERTAINMENT—a comedy extravaganza, featuring the kind of madcap craziness and wacky hijinks that you can get only when you give nearly $2 trillion a year to an organization with the proven financial management expertise of a tub of bait. . . So sit back . . . and enjoy it.  Hey, you paid for it.”

Note that Dave Barry wrote that in 2001.  It has only gotten worse.

So, what do you do if you want to buy your park?  

The answer is “Exactly what you have been doing – getting organized and prepared for the opportunity, if it ever comes along.”    

You cannot predict the future any more than I can.  

You can’t know in advance if your park owner will want to sell the park, let alone sell it to the resident group.  You can’t know in advance if you will have enough resident participation to make the purchase effort successful.  You can’t know in advance if the national economy will be robust enough for you to find the funding you need to buy the park.  

But what you can know is that other park groups have succeeded and they are just like you.  They had the same fears and concerns and faced the same unknowns.  But they prevailed and SO CAN YOU.

CRISIS
If you choose to view the future as a CRISIS, it might be helpful if you knew what actually is the “Fiscal Cliff?”

Basically, if they hadn’t made a deal in Washington, the “Triggers” would have been  thrown.  (NOTE that we really don’t (so far) know the impacts of the ‘deal’ they actually made.)

The Triggers are:
    Tax Hikes, which means everyone pays more, with the likely burden falling on the medium and lower income folks.  Hikes include income taxes, capital gains taxes, investment taxes, estate taxes, dividend taxes, social security taxes, and alternative minimum taxes.
    Government Spending Cuts (big ones), which means reduced economic activity and lots of job cuts (initially mostly government jobs, but maybe as much as 3.4 million jobs lost overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)
    Reduction in unemployment benefits
    Increases (big) in health care taxes
    And some other stuff.

The overall result could be another recession.

From the point of view of residents seeking to purchase their parks, all that could STILL be good.  Just keep plugging away.

Ain’t life grand.

Deane