It occurred to me that all the prestige movies that closed out 2010 have to do with great acts of endurance. 127 Hours is about surviving in the worst possible circumstances. The excellent Black Swan is about what pressure will do to you if you let it. Even the most important scene of True Grit is about going past the breaking point.
As I said in the beginning of my books lead this week, “[s]ince the financial crisis is now a precocious toddler of 2 years old—you turn your back on that little scamp for a minute and he’s doing something unspeakably horrible to the family dog—we have all had time to digest how fucked we are.” All we have heard, again and again, is how terrible the recession is, and how we have still not recovered. Even our movies now are about putting up with it, taking it, and waiting it out.
We are now participants in the rope-a-dope economy, taking it again and again, wondering how much longer it can go on, waiting for our chance to get one solid swing in, wondering if that opportunity will ever come. Retail figures this Christmas look good. Will this be the time to strike back? We’ve had a dozen false openings since the summer of 2008, signs that were interpreted as positive by all the right people. But we haven’t come back yet. Is now our chance? How about now? Or is it better to take it for a while longer, to keep waiting? Will 2011 be our year?
Bull.
Just move to a country that’s doing well.
If you have a master’s or doctorate it’s not hard.
2011 will NOT be our year, this will be the decade of America’s hollowing out, but around 2020 China will be on the downswing, so after that it’s unpredictable.
Not until we get a real jobs program. Galactus, it pisses me off to no end that no one in D.C. appears to have the courage to even silently mouth “WPA” or “CCC”. We learned nothing from the Great Depression other than “Hoover, now there was a smart fella!” apparently. Do you remember when Obama actually talked about experimenting with solutions like FDR back in ’09? Boy did that sure get beat out of him fast.
Hate to break it to you, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. We still have about twice the housing stock on the market than is considered healthy. People are still deeply in debt, and what’s worse using retirement accounts to pay todays bills. Industrial jobs are still on the decline. Corporate cash reserves are very high, but unlikely to be spent on new hiring in any real numbers any time soon. With demand being met at current production there really is no reason to do so. Until construction comes back and we decide how to create jobs to replace the industrial sector that simply won’t be coming back extensive hiring won’t happen. Recent employment gains don’t even keep pace with new additions to the labor market never mind replace the millions of jobs lost this past few years.
From the banking perspective the mortgage crisis isn’t over and won’t be until unemployment drops considerably. There are millions of mortgages which are technically far behind in payments, but which the banks haven’t had time to process as foreclosures. There are more complicated and more frightening threats to the banking system than these as well. For every dollar of equity in any given mortgage 2 to 3 dollars have been borrowed or gambled against it, conservatively. The effect is that for every billion dollars in mortgage default the banking system is on the hook for 3 to 4 billion in losses. This isn’t a United States or a Euro or a Yuan problem. It is an international problem. When Ireland has banking problems so does Bank of America. When BOA has problems every local bank relying on them for cash flow has problems. When local banks have limited cash flow so do local businesses.
On the government side we are spending not only my kids future tax revenue but my eventual grandkids as well. US Treasury bonds have been downgraded for the first time ever. The weakening dollar has export/import advantages but a huge attendant risk. There is a very real possibility that oil stops trading in dollars, or countries which use it as a reserve currency divest if this trend continues. Should China significantly reduce its’ use of the dollar as a reserve currrency the value of our currency would plummet. If oil shifts to trading in Euros rather than dollars the effect on energy costs and on the larger US economy could be catastrophic.
Basically, as Douglass Adams put it; ‘We aren’t home and dry. We couldn’t even be said to be home and briskly towelling off.’
Outer Cow
Oddly, I agree with you to a point. The transportation infrastructure in this country is old and needing repair or replacement in many places. Our reliance on oil is dangerous both from a national security and an economic security standpoint. Some kind of incentives for the private market to innovate our way past oil would be worth the federal investment. Spending money at todays dollars makes sense over waiting for 5 years when costs will be higher as well.
And we shouldn’t have extended either unemployment or the Bush tax cuts. The former is an incentive to laziness and a giveaway to the type that sits around for 2 years whining about not finding work. The latter is sound in principle but not in timing. When running deficits reducing revenue isn’t a great idea.
For my money FDR was the worst president this country has ever had or will have (God help us if one comes along who’s worse anyway.) He was a good Marxist, but a poor American with ideals out of step not just with this nation but with reality (as of course all socialists or Marxists are.) But he did partially get this right. Spending money on things we would eventually have to spend money on anyway makes sense, particularly if it has the benefit of creating jobs as well.
Regarding unemployment benefits, I do think it’s ridiculous how we keep trying to fix the problem of high unemployment with stop-gap measures like extending unemployment benefits over and over again instead of actually trying to fix the actual problem by implementing job and training programs, but if we’re not going to do that, then at least extending unemployment benefits is the best stimulus program the government is willing to use at the moment. & while of course, there will always be some people taking advantage of the system (though I think it’s vastly more fiscally prudent to worry first about the uber-rich corporations who are taking advantage of the current system than the poor) the problem isn’t that so many people are lazy, the problem is that the jobs they’re trained for and can support families aren’t there. Let them sink or swim and sure, some of them will swim, but a whole fuckton will sink because they are the least able in society with the least resources to do anything else, and letting so many sink would have a disastrous effect on the economy, no? If the banks are too big to fail, doesn’t the same hold for the middle-class?
But we’re agreed at least that it was a bad idea to continue the Bush Tax cuts, though I don’t believe they’re sound in principle. I won’t be happy until we’ve got Eisenhower’s 90% rate on the richest back. It fosters growth and sustainable businesses when they very top can’t just lock all the profits away in Switzerland.
& for my money GWB was the worst president this country has ever had. He was a good Fascist, but a poor American. But tell me, how is nanny-state socialism coupled with regulated capitalism out of step with reality? I’m not a communist, but I’m sure as hell a socialist who looks on at Scandinavia with continued envy. What am I missing, Seattleblues? Feel free to smack me around a bit, I’m honestly interested in your response.
To be clear-
I completely understand the appeal of socialism. I’ve always leaned toward the moderate end of libertarian thought personally, but the seeming ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ is a hard concept to reject on its face.
Having said that, Scandinavia is not the United States. It is a culturally homogeneous society, and a small country. What works where people share common motives and preconceptions may not where this isn’t the case. On grounds of feasibility I don’t think it would work here.
Additionally, America is an individualistic nation. In our narrative about ourselves we laud the underdog who won. We praise the fellow that earned success by hard work and discipline over time. Our heroes are the Lone Ranger types. This is set deeply enough in our national psyche that I doubt very much that an altruistic notion like socialism stands much chance. Consider- In most of Europe socialist is at worst neutral and often acclamatory. Here it most often is used in a derogatory sense.
At a deeper level for me, socialism seems to gain doubtful short term benefits at a high long term cost. Continueing to provide unemployment for as long as the person is out of work seems compassionate and beneficial, at first. But in doing so we remove the impetus to find a solution to a problem. We take from people the initiative and resource that makes a democracy viable. Without educated thoughtful citizens with minds and opinions of their own, a democracy is really no more than a popularity contest. Only in this contest the best liar (of either party) with the best hair stylist or tailor wins, not the most competent or honorable.
Put it another way. I lost my job nearly 2 years ago in construction. Because of the terms of my employment (subcontracting in name while working in the corporate office) I recieved no unemployment. Without that cushion I was forced to figure it out, started a business and am doing fairly decently. Please understand, this isn’t braggadocio. I’m of average intelligence with average connections. My upbringing was middle class by way of a poor mans income, as my father was a contractor during the recession in the 80’s. In other words, I’m nothing special. But I did what I had to do because it had to be done.
The fear I have of the long term effects of socialism is to take that chance away from average guys like me. The fear I have is that after a generation or two without personal struggle and personal reward and costs the heart of this country that made it great will wither and die.
I still fail to see why we need to be a small, homogeneous society to make socialism work, because by your measure we aren’t one, and yet socialism is already here, and working, and people love it. The Right may have tried to turn the word “socialism” into a pejorative, but that doesn’t stop people from using the magic of cognitive dissonance & loving Social Security and Medicare. But still, I don’t buy the “we’re a nation of individualists” line. Sure, there’s been great effort to lionize the self-made man and the by-your-own-bootstraps ideal, but we’re also a nation of great union struggles and battles against the robber-barons. I know a lot of union members and I know they understand and care deeply about the power of working together towards a common goal and collective bargaining. I find it rare that union workers worship the idol of “I can do it all on my own”. It doesn’t mean they aren’t Real Americans, it just means they no longer fetishize being the lone wolf as much as they may have once did.
But I too agree that extending unemployment benefits FOREVER for people capable to work is not smart, and I don’t propose we do it. I propose we fund training programs for needed jobs and start up programs like the WPA and CCC again. We should be focused on actually fixing the problem of high unemployment, not treating the symptons indefinitely like that will somehow make the problem go away. But since it’s clear the government doesn’t have the balls to do that right now, extending unemployment benefits was scored by the CBO as the most effective government stimulus program the government is doing right now, and we definitely need government stimulus spending right now. And I’m sorry that because of your work situation you didn’t have the benefit of unemployment benefits, but if you had, you wouldn’t have just been sitting on your ass riding high for the next 2 years. You would have been having to go out, applying for work, while making do on a considerably lower stipend then you had been used to. There are sticks and carrots built into the unemployment system, it is not simply a give-away to the lazy. Do some people take advantage of it? Of course, people take advantage of every human system ever devised. But for the vast majority it’s a way to keep them in their homes and their kids fed until they can figure out something better, like you did. Do they perhaps not have the impetus you did? Sure, but most new business fail. A system that relies on all the unemployed quickly figuring out a given industry (or inventing a new one) and jumping back into the black in short order is not a realistic or feasible system. Anecdotal outliers do not a convincing business model make, no matter how run-of-the-mill you make yourself out to be.
And just to be a douche, Scandinavia isn’t a country, it’s a region, and the Lone Ranger famously had a sidekick.