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Economy
Take your Zoloft before reading: The Coming Fury of an Angry America
2010-01-17
The American middle class will not spend its way out of disaster, if only because it can't. There are no savings.
Cash savings are up, actually, and having been rising as both a dollar amount and a percentage of monthly income since the first quarter of last year, if not earlier.
The house is worthless.
Only if one needs to sell it.
The credit cards are gone. Jobs are disappearing. Today is bad and tomorrow looks worse. People are nervous, frightened, worried. They are behind in the mortgage, and struggle to make health insurance payments. All the while, they watch the stock market explode, the bonuses arrogantly roll on, and their government lie to their faces that the "recovery" is underway. China is booming, so is India and Brazil. Beneath the hope, patriotism, and the flag, the American middle class can feel it all slipping away.
It's not good, it's not going to get much better so long as the lot in charge continue their present path, but few things outside the hard sciences actually travel straight-line graphs. Look at global temperatures.


Posted by:Uncle Phester

#5  We can turn it around IF we bring an end to the dual-party oligarchy under which money-fiddlers captured large swaths of our governments and turned our economy into one based on asset-flipping rather than designing, building and selling high value-added products that the world actually needs and can actually afford with ready money.

Both left (cf James Fallows, back from China, writing in The Atlantic, or Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone) and right (cf VDH, Steyn et al) are beginning to converge on the same diagnosis: there's nothing fundamentally wrong with American society;the problem is our corrupt, stupid, mendacious and completely bought political class.

If and when we start electing people who actually have real skills-- not lawyers or community organizers or lifelong pols or shills for this or that industry-- we will finally get our government back, and then we can rebuild. A big "if", though....
Posted by: lex   2010-01-17 19:09  

#4  The house is worthless.
Only if one needs to sell it.

Au contraire, Mon Ami. Something I learned when we bought our place in November is that the market for average houses (at least here in SC, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country) has not only not gone down, it's actually rising. The market that HAS collapsed is the one for mid-6 figure and up McMansions, which is all that builders were putting up for several years...and are STILL putting up because they've invested so heavily in the market.

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski   2010-01-17 15:38  

#3  Badanov is saying that the article is too long and should not be read.

Now I need more Zoloft...! ;->
Posted by: Uncle Phester   2010-01-17 13:55  

#2  wtsm, badanov?
Posted by: twobyfour   2010-01-17 12:38  

#1  tl;dr
Posted by: badanov   2010-01-17 11:10  

00:00