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Annie: Hello and thank you for listening to the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza’s third community election panel. Today we’ll be discussing the economy. My name is Annie Flanzraich and I’m the news editor and I’m happy to introduce our panelists.
Bill: My name is Bill Ferrall I am director of business relationships with Tahoe Lending Group. And we are a local mortgage lender, been here for 12 years on the north shore. We are involved in mortgage lending, so economic issues and the impact of those are very important to us for our business as well as our community.
George: I’m George LeBard I’m the executive director of Project MANA. We are a local hunger relief agency. I guess the economy directly affects our clients. We know when they need help there are things going on with the economy. Usually that’s the extent of my experience with the economy.
Roger: Hi I’m Roger Wittenberg, CEO of Boulder Bay LLC a development project up here at Lake Tahoe. I’m 60 years old I’ve been in business for myself most of that time. I’ve started a number of companies, probably the most recognizable is the Trex Company.
Annie: What issues are you looking at economically for the 2008 election that are in focus for you as far as where candidates stand or what their policies are?
George: I consider myself apolitical and I haven’t thought too much about that. The first thing that comes to mind is a livable wage for people. Most of our clients that we see that come for food are working people. They are working in the service industry that supports the tourist economy here and they just aren’t making enough money to make ends meet. There are also a lot of single parents who have even a harder time because putting your kid in childcare is expensive, if they are school aged that helps. A lot of people even have two jobs and they are just not making the wages they need to make to be able to afford to live here. When you consider everything you need to do, that you need to have to be legal … just things like having health care, that’s expensive. Having your utilities during the winter gets expensive and with the price of gas always going up we see that effecting people and that effects the price of the groceries in the store.
Bill: For me it’s threefold. One, I think one of the most important piece of any presidential election is the economic savvy of the president — not mingling too much with control issue or over or under taxation. There are so many delicate balances that need to take place. Being able to put the right people and the right advisers in place that they can be well informed as to the impact of things as they happen. A good example of that is recently the president talked about relief of mortgage owners of sub prime mortgages and freezing their interest rate for a period of time. That has a tremendous ripple effect through the financial markets and the free market should be able to run it’s course without having government interaction in those things. Although I applaud the president with the initial reasoning behind that move, ultimately I think it’s a bad thing for ht economy because it will artificially try to inject stimulus into a system that will fix itself through the free market. Secondly I think that the president needs to understand the impact of health care and some of those issues as well as taxation. There is a lot of potential for disaster with a president who doesn’t understand all of those things, and several of the candidates have very little experience in this regard. It’s very concerning to me that they can take office and not even have any understanding of running and company much less the largest free enterprise in the world, which the United States government is. And the third thing is that I think that the president needs to be able to pick well their advisors, being able to find the right people to help them with the situations they don’t know. There are so many things the president can’t be expected to know but they have to know and no one person is going to know all those things so the right advisors and the right team. Looking at the candidates for who they have backing them and their track record of being able to select well is a really critical piece.
Roger: I think in order of priority … I think the first one is we have been promised a comprehensive energy management program by every presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. Every presidential candidate who has won has caved into the whims and fancies of big energy ever since then. Clearly it is now time to bite the bullet and stand up and make the tough choices to put a comprehensive federal energy program in place that helps develop self-initiated green energy technology such as wind and solar, geothermal, that kind of thing and to get the biggest potential energy draw harvested and that is conservation in automobiles and in housing. Those couple things although they might be painful in the beginning will go a long way to put our economy back in progress and stop some of this massive exportation of our dollars to other countries which is weakening the dollar and makes oil look so expensive. The rest of the world oil is bout 45 a barrel its 85 a here because oil is traded in dollars and the dollar is so weak so we suffer more than the other countries. No. 2 is the globalization of good and services especially goods around the world. I don’t feel like we have an equitable position in opening our boarders to just about every country that wants to put products into this country with very little controls we have poison in our food, we have poison on our kids toys there is little to nothing done about it other thank lip service. And yet as a manufacturer if you try to export our good to those countries you will probably be unsuccessful. There will be paperwork required that you never knew about and your good will sit at the docks and little to nothing is done about that and I don’t think it’s an equitable situation. So those two things if we could just get that from Washington I’d be delighted.
Annie: You’ve mentioned health care and you’ve mentioned a livable wage. What other economic issues do you feel like the presidential candidates should really be paying attention to?
George: I think they need to be role models. I think the whole country needs to tighten up a little bit. There is a whole movement going on about carbon footprint and what we use and the resources we use, I think we need to think about that a little bit about how much we use and what resources we use. But I think we need a good role model somebody who comes in and keeps running up the deficit I don’t think is the best role model. In a way I really believe that our leaders effect us as role models. If we have a leader who doesn’t care about running up the deficit, why should we care about running up our credit? Why should we care about it? I would like to see a good role model in there who says let’s tighten up on the amount of resources we use, let’s be part of the world lets think globally and not just locally or think globally and act locally as the saying goes.
Bill: I agree along those lines. I think interdependence is a word that comes to mind. It’s our ability to be dependant on our own resources instead of looking to third world countries for oil. You see a lot about green products, green environment, green towns, green houses, green everything and the move toward that is extraordinary and I love and applaud all the efforts in that regard. For us as a country to start becoming more interdependent rather than looking toward these other countries and really putting our economics in their hands and then creating tensions and war over our economic condition. I think that the current war now is has shifted completely from finding a bad guy to oil and we are approaching $100 a barrel it’s backed off to to less than $90 now and all those things are working their way through. But this kind of thing can be very detrimental to the consumer and the president has to be tantamount in that effort.
Roger: Defending our boarders. I believe that we need foreign workforce in this country. Other countries manage it, South Korea is an excellent example where they welcome Chinese labors in so they can produce their goods and services at cots effective rates. They simply require them to be registered and documented as they enter and they have to leave within 3 years, housing and food has to be provided for them. There is a long list of people waiting to work in South Korea. It works well, I think we could do something similar here.
Annie: (Addressing the) the mortgage crisis and home sales and how that kind of has a ripple effect through the economy. What kind of policies would you like to see as far as that. Do there need to be policies or is this something the market could take care of?
Bill: Well I have a lot of experience here and my belief is that the free market needs to prevail. The president should act as little or if any in this crisis as they can because the market created it and the market is correcting it. Unfortunately for a lot of people, they get into homes they shouldn’t have gotten into through creative products, mortgages that promised no down payment with poor credit scores and now they are feeling that pinch not because the mortgage is too expensive but because the value of their home has declined and that is what has created this. For years they have talked about a housing bubble and a lot of people said there wasn’t one. Well, we’re experiencing that there was and this bubble will work it’s way through. Housing prices will adjust and they we will recover from that into a new market. Every market has cyclical up and down cycles and this is no different.
Roger: I think that homebuilders are their own worst enemy in many ways, they are kind of like farmers. What ever is good they will be sure to take care of it to the extent that it will no longer be good. It’s a supply and demand situation where we created tremendous supply, we drove supply by incentivizing people to buy house that perhaps it wasn’t inappropriate to incentivize. So we created a fictitious demand to a large extent and now we have to realize that either there has to be a program to support that on a ongoing basis or our supply engine for building housing is too aggressive.
George: For me there is still a part that can relate back to our leaders and the bigger picture. There is a level of responsibility here that I think we shouldn’t be putting people in something they cant afford if these lenders know the person can’t afford it or they’ve got bad credit and they are putting them in there knowing they can’t afford it, that’s a level of responsibility that I think stretches back to our leaders.
Bill: My name is Bill Ferrall I am director of business relationships with Tahoe Lending Group. And we are a local mortgage lender, been here for 12 years on the north shore. We are involved in mortgage lending, so economic issues and the impact of those are very important to us for our business as well as our community.
George: I’m George LeBard I’m the executive director of Project MANA. We are a local hunger relief agency. I guess the economy directly affects our clients. We know when they need help there are things going on with the economy. Usually that’s the extent of my experience with the economy.
Roger: Hi I’m Roger Wittenberg, CEO of Boulder Bay LLC a development project up here at Lake Tahoe. I’m 60 years old I’ve been in business for myself most of that time. I’ve started a number of companies, probably the most recognizable is the Trex Company.
Annie: What issues are you looking at economically for the 2008 election that are in focus for you as far as where candidates stand or what their policies are?
George: I consider myself apolitical and I haven’t thought too much about that. The first thing that comes to mind is a livable wage for people. Most of our clients that we see that come for food are working people. They are working in the service industry that supports the tourist economy here and they just aren’t making enough money to make ends meet. There are also a lot of single parents who have even a harder time because putting your kid in childcare is expensive, if they are school aged that helps. A lot of people even have two jobs and they are just not making the wages they need to make to be able to afford to live here. When you consider everything you need to do, that you need to have to be legal … just things like having health care, that’s expensive. Having your utilities during the winter gets expensive and with the price of gas always going up we see that effecting people and that effects the price of the groceries in the store.
Bill: For me it’s threefold. One, I think one of the most important piece of any presidential election is the economic savvy of the president — not mingling too much with control issue or over or under taxation. There are so many delicate balances that need to take place. Being able to put the right people and the right advisers in place that they can be well informed as to the impact of things as they happen. A good example of that is recently the president talked about relief of mortgage owners of sub prime mortgages and freezing their interest rate for a period of time. That has a tremendous ripple effect through the financial markets and the free market should be able to run it’s course without having government interaction in those things. Although I applaud the president with the initial reasoning behind that move, ultimately I think it’s a bad thing for ht economy because it will artificially try to inject stimulus into a system that will fix itself through the free market. Secondly I think that the president needs to understand the impact of health care and some of those issues as well as taxation. There is a lot of potential for disaster with a president who doesn’t understand all of those things, and several of the candidates have very little experience in this regard. It’s very concerning to me that they can take office and not even have any understanding of running and company much less the largest free enterprise in the world, which the United States government is. And the third thing is that I think that the president needs to be able to pick well their advisors, being able to find the right people to help them with the situations they don’t know. There are so many things the president can’t be expected to know but they have to know and no one person is going to know all those things so the right advisors and the right team. Looking at the candidates for who they have backing them and their track record of being able to select well is a really critical piece.
Roger: I think in order of priority … I think the first one is we have been promised a comprehensive energy management program by every presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. Every presidential candidate who has won has caved into the whims and fancies of big energy ever since then. Clearly it is now time to bite the bullet and stand up and make the tough choices to put a comprehensive federal energy program in place that helps develop self-initiated green energy technology such as wind and solar, geothermal, that kind of thing and to get the biggest potential energy draw harvested and that is conservation in automobiles and in housing. Those couple things although they might be painful in the beginning will go a long way to put our economy back in progress and stop some of this massive exportation of our dollars to other countries which is weakening the dollar and makes oil look so expensive. The rest of the world oil is bout 45 a barrel its 85 a here because oil is traded in dollars and the dollar is so weak so we suffer more than the other countries. No. 2 is the globalization of good and services especially goods around the world. I don’t feel like we have an equitable position in opening our boarders to just about every country that wants to put products into this country with very little controls we have poison in our food, we have poison on our kids toys there is little to nothing done about it other thank lip service. And yet as a manufacturer if you try to export our good to those countries you will probably be unsuccessful. There will be paperwork required that you never knew about and your good will sit at the docks and little to nothing is done about that and I don’t think it’s an equitable situation. So those two things if we could just get that from Washington I’d be delighted.
Annie: You’ve mentioned health care and you’ve mentioned a livable wage. What other economic issues do you feel like the presidential candidates should really be paying attention to?
George: I think they need to be role models. I think the whole country needs to tighten up a little bit. There is a whole movement going on about carbon footprint and what we use and the resources we use, I think we need to think about that a little bit about how much we use and what resources we use. But I think we need a good role model somebody who comes in and keeps running up the deficit I don’t think is the best role model. In a way I really believe that our leaders effect us as role models. If we have a leader who doesn’t care about running up the deficit, why should we care about running up our credit? Why should we care about it? I would like to see a good role model in there who says let’s tighten up on the amount of resources we use, let’s be part of the world lets think globally and not just locally or think globally and act locally as the saying goes.
Bill: I agree along those lines. I think interdependence is a word that comes to mind. It’s our ability to be dependant on our own resources instead of looking to third world countries for oil. You see a lot about green products, green environment, green towns, green houses, green everything and the move toward that is extraordinary and I love and applaud all the efforts in that regard. For us as a country to start becoming more interdependent rather than looking toward these other countries and really putting our economics in their hands and then creating tensions and war over our economic condition. I think that the current war now is has shifted completely from finding a bad guy to oil and we are approaching $100 a barrel it’s backed off to to less than $90 now and all those things are working their way through. But this kind of thing can be very detrimental to the consumer and the president has to be tantamount in that effort.
Roger: Defending our boarders. I believe that we need foreign workforce in this country. Other countries manage it, South Korea is an excellent example where they welcome Chinese labors in so they can produce their goods and services at cots effective rates. They simply require them to be registered and documented as they enter and they have to leave within 3 years, housing and food has to be provided for them. There is a long list of people waiting to work in South Korea. It works well, I think we could do something similar here.
Annie: (Addressing the) the mortgage crisis and home sales and how that kind of has a ripple effect through the economy. What kind of policies would you like to see as far as that. Do there need to be policies or is this something the market could take care of?
Bill: Well I have a lot of experience here and my belief is that the free market needs to prevail. The president should act as little or if any in this crisis as they can because the market created it and the market is correcting it. Unfortunately for a lot of people, they get into homes they shouldn’t have gotten into through creative products, mortgages that promised no down payment with poor credit scores and now they are feeling that pinch not because the mortgage is too expensive but because the value of their home has declined and that is what has created this. For years they have talked about a housing bubble and a lot of people said there wasn’t one. Well, we’re experiencing that there was and this bubble will work it’s way through. Housing prices will adjust and they we will recover from that into a new market. Every market has cyclical up and down cycles and this is no different.
Roger: I think that homebuilders are their own worst enemy in many ways, they are kind of like farmers. What ever is good they will be sure to take care of it to the extent that it will no longer be good. It’s a supply and demand situation where we created tremendous supply, we drove supply by incentivizing people to buy house that perhaps it wasn’t inappropriate to incentivize. So we created a fictitious demand to a large extent and now we have to realize that either there has to be a program to support that on a ongoing basis or our supply engine for building housing is too aggressive.
George: For me there is still a part that can relate back to our leaders and the bigger picture. There is a level of responsibility here that I think we shouldn’t be putting people in something they cant afford if these lenders know the person can’t afford it or they’ve got bad credit and they are putting them in there knowing they can’t afford it, that’s a level of responsibility that I think stretches back to our leaders.
