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Dairy
Business
* Newton Bair
It’s not too hard to remember
back to the time when ten cents
looked like a lot of money. That
was when it was hand to get your
hands on a nickel, and a dime was
a fortune.
My father proudly let me hold a
hundred dollar bill once, when I
was about eight years old. He
called me into the room where he
was preparing to leave for a trip to
Washington D.C. and
ceremoniously displayed the bill.
He said, “take a good look at this,
you may not see very many of
these in your lifetime.” That
comment only reflected the
economic tenor of the early
twenties, when a dollar was a
dollar but not too plentiful in big
notes.
Today, most of us are ac
customed to handling thousands of
dollars in our business. Not that we
own so much more in real worth
than our parents did - our income
and outgo are both soaring in the
inflated atmosphere of the times.
Everything seems bigger than it
once was.
That bigness has gotten a lot of
us into trouble. During those wild
years of the Seventies when we
were all enthralled with soaring
inflation, we could always assume
that next year would bring in more
dollars than last year.
We got in the habit of dealing in
thousands of even hundreds of
thousands, while still drifting in a
hundred dollar mentality. It was
no trouble to borrow five hundred
thousand dollars when you have a
monthly milk check of ten
thousand.
For the conservative operator
attuned to watching for the red
flags it might work, but for the
intuitive non-pencil-pusher it
spelled disaster. There were
suddenly too many hands out for
the dollars available each month,
after paying the banker for the use
Of the money.
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who got caugnt in the thousand
million - billion trap with a hun
dred dollar mind. The biggest
blunders were made in
Washington, where our National
leaders allowed debts measured in
billions to pile up. In addition to the
National debt, we also find our
selves saddled with a trade deficit
of 1123,000,000,000.
Take a good look at that figure. It
translates into 123 thousand
million dollars. The national debt
is over a Trillion dollars. It gets too
big when written out in deoimal
figures. I think that a trillion is
actually only a million million
anyway. It looks like this -
$1,000,000,000,000. When that figure
is multiplied by only one or two, it
boggles the mind and the
head ache. Especially when toted
up in red ink.
My father had a hundred dollar
mentality, quite sufficient for his
day. He even retired with nearly
$lO,OOO (a hundred hundred) in the
bank, and that was enough to last
both parents through their life.
They never got fully into the
overblown economic society that
made the hundred dollar mentality
obsolete. It always was hard for
dad to think in terms of thousands.
Whether we have a hundred or a
thousand dollar mentality, it pays
to keep everything in proper
perspective. The trouble arises
when my hundred mentality has to
deal with thousands or even
hundreds of thousands. The con
cept becomes harder to grasp, and
I tend to throw caution to the wind.
I spend money like there’s no end
to it. The pencil and pad aren’t
good enough to keep me in line. I
need a computer.
It will probably take anouther
generation to correct our distorted
economic mentality. One that is
washed in the waves of inflation
deflated and finally lands on a
safer shore of stable values. Or a
world that matches our hundred
dollar minds with the world’s
milliond ollar reality.
The name agribusiness depends on.
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