Gale: A Downsized America

By Dave Gale

This morning my wife and I were talking about recipes. She was telling me that going through her old recipe cookbooks that she was having trouble measuring out the right amount of ingredients. I asked her what she was talking about. She commented that the size of the cans and bags of ingredients had changed in size/volume. She looked at several of her cookbooks to see when they were published, some back in the 60's and compared those to the more recent ones. There were a lot of differences.

It's amazing to see and compare things in this day and age. With our food, we're getting less in a can, box, bag, or container and paying more. Even the containers are smaller. Inflation doesn't even count because we're starting with less in the containers than we used to get. Then with the old Wal-Mart adage "We sale for less" and the old "price rollback" gimmick, raise up the prices for less contents and then bring the price down a little and then tell the consumer they're getting a good deal. Because of this scheme, everyone is playing that game.

With the NAFTA, NAFTA 2, WTO, the FTAA, etc. we're downsizing our companies and businesses. Even if you still have a job, it's being downsized with less room, equipment, material, etc. to work. This is the way everyone is producing now. And this is a good thing? Now we have global open trade across borders and if you notice we're getting less content, less material in the product, less quality, etc. but not for a lower price, which NAFTA was all about. No, it's usually the same or higher. So how did this lunatic business practice help our country of consumers? Guess what, it didn't. The power elite of the Fortune 500 and the global elite are merely, are you ready for this? They're downsizing your wallet and spending power.

With the way our government, green groups, and the UN are buying up land and dictating it's use, they're downsizing our local communities, counties, and states. With the loss of horizontal growth, we'll be like some of the Far East countries and we'll be forced to go vertical. Along with the downsizing of land, the buildings that you put on them are downsized. It's merely an optical illusion to think that a building, especially a house is big, it's how they're designed and is the floor space actually what they claim?

I was doing some remodeling in my downsized cracker box ranch replacing some interior doors. The house was built in the late 70's. I bought a bathroom entry door and a closet door. I tried to mount just the door into the old frame first. Guess what? I had lost an 1/8" on each side of the door which means I had a ¼" gap on the latch side. I had to mount the door and make a neat little shim to take up the gap on the stop because I had used the new door frame for something else. Because of this downsizing on doors, I mounted the whole new closet door/frame so I wouldn't get stuck again.

Our schools are another fine example of downsizing. More money being spent on education for less teachers, less learning material in the books, curving of grades, etc. gives our kids a downsized education and downsized knowledge. Remember the expression "dumbing down"? My wife works in the kitchen of one our elementary schools in our community and she's getting downsized food of course and the meal sizes are even being downsized because of the manipulative downsizing of nutrition according to the USDA but the lunch prices are going up. Imagine that.

There are countless other examples of downsizing that we could think of but it would stretch into infinity. The only thing that doesn't get downsized are taxes, the wages of Congress, and the size of the federal government. I wonder why I would ever think that this could happen in our downsized society?

It won't be the United States of America, soon it will be the Downsized States of America.