Sailin' On

The Great Depression featured, among many things, a 25% unemployment rate. The economy was stagnant, didn't grow for years, a lot of people died as a result. Dust scarred a swath through the southwest, some bears made good and bulls didn't exist in reality.

So the New Deal was not some gigantic government expansion born of liberal ideology but necessarily pragmatic counter-cyclical spending. The Depression lasted a long time; a few decades after the Industrial Revolution it looked as if the great capitalist structure was perhaps a great failure. So we're lucky it WAS a cycle, if a long and desperate and brutal one. Roosevelt doesn't get credit from conservatives for his policies - a great deal like to credit the spending associated with WWII solely with bringing us out of the mire - but look at the ideological trench these conservative Republicans are in, and the validity of such ideas is minimized. They simply can't translate those ideas into policies that work. Tax cuts? That's about it - we see how this goes. Hoover did nothing in the face of impending doom and the result was a prolonged stagnation of the economy. I suppose that losing wars isn't very profitable, and the bedtime story of successful tax cut stimulus is a myth born in the ether.

Besides, a big reason for this burst bubble is the fact that we have been spending more than we've been saving. That's our fault. So why give tax cuts to people who will spend them on HDTVs and Wendy's and SUVs and pornography? We forgot how to save, and all the economists and the politicians do is tell us to spend. 9/11 - go shopping! Economy is up - buy a house! Economy is down - buy a house cheap! Housing prices forever rise, you see. The basic premise that people do better when they have more of their own money has been refuted. We clearly don't know what the fuck we're doing.

Conservative Republicans don't seem to think that military spending counts as government spending - defense is a massive expenditure, we have a military which is about 7X bigger than the next biggest. It isn't necessary; we should lead with our head and not our heart with respect to foreign policy, and if we could manage to do that, we would be in much better shape indeed, since we wouldn't have Republicans in power preaching tax cuts while expanding military spending, forcing us to borrow against the full faith and credit of a United States that is failing financially and simply has no clue when it comes to intelligent foreign policy. We're so SCARED all of the time - so we need this big, bad, very expensive military structure. Oh, and that structure is very profitable for a few very powerful people of course. What does this stimulate for the rest of us?

The government is spending money now because somebody has to. The worker/consumer/family doesn't have the extra money anymore and is cowed by failures of advice re: what to do with their incomes. Invest! But in what? We can't trust you sir, you may be running a Ponzi scheme. Well, we tried to buy a house but a lot of times you weren't as clear as you could have been regarding exactly what interest rate we'd be paying on this mortgage. We trusted you! And you sold us instruments, and said buy, and there you go. No one who advises investors to sell goes very far in an investment firm. That's not how money is made.

But then again, they only sold all of that because many, many of us weren't very smart. Really, we aren't so bright in this country. We don't know economics or civics very well, we treat evolution as a belief. We're very intellectually lazy sometimes. That is profitable for MSNBC and Fox News, and I understand that we work more hours than any other population on the globe, but maybe it's time to put down the tricked-out remote and cancel the DirecTV, eat some brain food and wean off of McDonald's and learn how the world works. We know what greases the axle, money, and yet we know very little about the application. The stock market once provided capital to industry - now it's a crapshoot that rewards the psychotic type-A personalities who are driven by this psychosis to succeed at all cost, fueled by trust funds and competitive insecurities and with no soul to provide drag. Nice penthouse, nice car, great party. Love ya.

I haven't made much money over the years and I have a job, so I'm not really affected or concerned. I'm sailing just like I always have, watching some abstract destruction of some peoples' lives, not much different than at any other time, observing the continuum of life and its successes for some and failures for others for all the reasons. I never invested or cared that much about money, and I don't care about retirement. I'm not scared the way I'm supposed to be - the system doesn't like me very much. I'll retire someday but I refuse to focus on it to some probable theory of my detriment. You might say that I'm going to crash and burn - I might say you're going to stagnate. Which is worse? I am a person without a profit scheme, and I'm fine with that. Life is good - I won an arts and crafts contest last week. The prize was a pound of Starbucks coffee. I left it at the bar. Now if I was really desperate, would I have done that? Sometimes it's good to learn to live small. That way you don't have trust the two dimensional figures on the TV, who are convinced of what you should do with your money. And then when it disappears down the rabbit hole, they do a lot of apologizing. But you're just as broke. Save your money.

The unemployment rate is just under 8% during the Great Correction. Good luck.