What I take issue with is fear mongering, and telling people that its past time they start preparing to live like the Waltons is just that.

You have got to be kidding me. You must be living in a different economic universe from the one that the rest of us live in.

And what happens if you lose your job and can't get another one?

Moving in with your parents or a sibling sounds like a good "Plan B" to me, whether they have a garden or not.

Fear mongering?

If the converging economic, climatic and energetic problems civilisation now faces doesn't scare the **** out of you, seek help.

I've been trying to live up to westexas ELP recommendations and so far it worked out very well for me. I needed a new roof on my small house, created an extra storey in the process, and paid cash thanks very much.

...telling people that its past time they start preparing to live like the Waltons is just that (fear mongering)

"We’re going to keep trying to strengthen the American family, to make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons."

- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1992

Actually, at least a couple of years ago, I wish there had been more fear mongering, and I wish this fear mongering had been in the main stream press. As bad as I thought the financial system might be, it is worse that my worst fears. Actually, the Waltons lived in a pretty big house as I recall.

Fear mongering? Holy Crap. Does it even enter your thoughts that there is a huge difference between now and 1929. How many people make or sell things that people NEED???
This is going to be worse than you seem to understand. 533,000 jobs in a month. What are they going to do? A job selling holiday trinkets?
Just how easy is it to predict the future? Close is far better for everyone than what I see Paulson et al doing. Put your faith into the panic stricken leadership we have now if you want. Good luck - you'll need it. I think Jeffery has been insightful.
D

It's not only way past time that they start preparing but it is past time they actually started. Living life king size is all very well on borrowed money till the lenders realize that the IOUs they've been issued are little better than Charmin.

Srivathsa

I was once told I was fear mongering, too.

It seems to be a reaction that occurs when the person making the statement isn't yet operating in the same context as the person providing the warning.

It's clear to me that you don't see what some of the rest of us see so Jeffrey's advice makes no sense to you. Of course, if and when your context changes, his advice will seem both prudent and prescient.

I stumbled across a remarkable CNBC clip, filmed almost a year ago. CNBC's Closing Bell interviews the CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Bryne. (It gets good about 2:45 minutes into the video):

Dec 2007: 'We are living in a house of cards'

Bryne: I think that we're living at the edge of a 1929 kind of disaster... I think that we've been living in a house of cards for about 6 years. The American economy is like an old man in an oxygen tent that you flood with oxygen, but when you turn off the oxygen, he fades very quickly. Well the oxygen in our system has been cheap credit... We're on the edge of global financial meltdown.

The hilarity comes when the co-host, Dylan Ratigan, tries to steer the conversation into happyland. Ratigan's stammering rationalization says a lot about how and why humanity finds itself in the predicament it does.

Ratigan: But I always judge the market based on what it does. It's a self-evident machine. And if you look at the past five years, they have been spectacular. Not just in terms of the stock market performance, but in terms of the emergence of lifestyle on the Earth. Meaning that we've watched the construction of billions of large buildings etcetera. And the emergence of a digital culture of consumption and technological commerce, to which, by the way, you have been a tremendous beneficiary. So I find it curious that you don't give [this economic prosperity] more credit.

Bryne: Well I think that prosperity has largely come from [the fact that] we've been writing checks on the bank account of future people. In one way or another, the FED and the Treasury have been inflating this economy with cheap credit for about 5 years longer than they should have, and I think it's all going to come to a pretty ugly end.