Animal Insting

Not too long ago, I had a Special Request from Aunt Cheryl to write about The Economy in my blog, but this is a very heavy and complicated topic, so every time I tried to think about it, I got tired and had to go take a nap.  But finally I decided I had a few things that I could say about The Economy, and that it was time to stop putting off writing about it.  So here goes.

The Economy is mostly made up of dollars and cents.  Dogs, who do not have opposable thumbs, cannot handle coins and paper bills very well, so usually we let our humans do stuff like count money and spend it and so forth.  But some dogs do like to mess with money, and what they do is they chew it up and swallow it.  But doing this is a very bad idea for several reasons, and here they are:

1.  If you eat paper bills or swallow coins, you take that money out of circulation, and then there is less money around for people to buy dog food with.
2.  Your humans will not like it if you chew up their money, no matter how careless they are in leaving it where you can reach it.  And if you chew up your humans' money, they may not be able to afford to buy you dog food.
3.  If you eat a bunch of paper money or swallow coins, they might get stuck in your guts, and then you will have to have expensive surgery, which your human will have to spend money on instead of spending it on dog food.

Anyway, as you can see, the most important thing about having a Good Economy is for people to have enough money to take care of their dogs and cats, and buy them yummy food and treats and soft beds and stuff like that.

And the way people get enough money to do that is usually by having a job.  So another part of The Economy is having jobs for everybody who needs one.  And if people want to retire and stay home to play with their pets or their grandchildren, they should be able to do that, too.

Then there is also something called the Stock Market, which is part of The Economy, too.  The Stock Market is not the same as a supermarket, and it's not even a place where you go to buy cattle and pigs and other livestock, even though the name sounds like maybe it would be one of those things.  What it is is a place where you buy a part of, or "stock" in some company and then you cross your paws and hope that company makes lots of money.  But sometimes it doesn't make money, and then you don't make money either.  In fact, you might lose your money.

And this is what sort of happened to Mom because she was getting money from the Stock Market, and then the Stock Market did bad things, so Mom couldn't get as much money from there anymore.  But luckily, she can still afford to buy us dog food, which is what counts.  We are waiting for the Stock Market to be nice and go up again, which it is sort of doing, but it is being very slow about doing it, which makes Mom feel annoyed, especially when she has to buy something expensive like our new air-conditioner that she bought in May.

So anyway, if the Stock Market goes down, and if people can't find jobs, and nobody has money to spend on dog food and other important stuff like house payments, that is called a Bad Economy.  Or sometimes it is called a Recession.  And that is what we have been in for a while now, and it's not much fun.  It's much better to have a Good Economy, but I'm not sure how to make a Bad Economy turn into a Good Economy.  But I'm not the only one who doesn't know this, because even the big, fancy economists can't figure out how to fix The Economy.




If the Bad Economy were a bad dog, you could take it to obedience class and use lots of positive training methods to teach it to be a good dog.  So maybe something like that would help make a Good Economy, too.  Hey, I'll bet the economists haven't thought of this, so I should probably write to them and suggest it.  And then if it works, I could maybe win the Nobel Prize in Dog Food Economics!