I once saw a plane crash at an airshow. The pilot made a vertical loop – in layman’s terms, a loop-the-loop – and though he completed the loop and had the nose of his plane pointed in the right direction at the bottom of the thing, he had not gotten enough height at the top of the maneuver, so the aircraft continued sinking rapidly downward, slammed into the ground belly-first, and exploded. You can not change the laws of physics, and gravity will have its say.
So it is with the current economy. Precipitated by NAFTA, outsourcing, shoddy and deceitful lending practices, deregulation, unrealistically low interest rates, rising health care costs, an ever-increasing dependence on ever-more-expensive sources of energy, unrealistic cuts in taxes and a deficit hemorrhaging cash into Iraq and Afghanistan, our economy spent the last 15 years pulling a giant, slow-moving vertical loop, and when we got to the bottom of it, no stimulus package in the world was enough to pull us out. Economics, like physics, has strict rules, and no amount of stimulus can stave off the inevitable – reality, like gravity, will have its say.
The problem with the recent “stimulus” packages are that they did too little, too late, and failed to address the continued downward motion of our economy. Jobs continue to fall away at an alarming rate while prices continue to climb and banks continue to operate unchecked under the same deregulation that finally shoved us over the edge a year and a half ago. We are headed for a huge and very long depression, but no one wants to acknowledge the fact, as if by ignoring the gorilla in the room, we can make it go away. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, gorillas tend to bash the Samsonite around and stomp on it a while much more so than they do to pack their belongings nicely and neatly inside and sedately catch a train for home. We are headed for a depression. I doubt anything can be done to stop it, at this point. But politicians continue to yank our chains and screw around with petty disagreements and power trips, threatening filibusters over non-existent issues like “death panels,” and doing everything but the job they are paid to do. And their constituents continue to enable them, in part because it’s easier to ignore it, and in part because to do something about it would require actually having to take a good, hard look at the conditions things are in. And frankly, conditions are terrifying.
If most of us took the necessary steps to inform ourselves as to exactly how FUBAR the situation is, I think we’d probably panic. Certainly there’s a marked portion of the populace incapable of acknowledging the reality, because to do so would threaten their sense of safety and that of their families. No one wants to think about losing his job or his bank going under and taking his savings or his house with it. No one wants to imagine dying for lack of affordable medical care or sending a child to war for an unwinnable action or with defective body armor. Unfortunately, we humans have a long history of sticking our heads in the sand in order to ignore reality. How else do you explain the thousands of people each year who kill themselves or someone else by drinking and driving? We are an idiotic lot, and the looming specter of depression does nothing at all to change that. It’s easier to blame Washington for our problems than it is to take responsibility for them and an active role in their resolution. It’s much less scary to tell ourselves things will get better, unemployment will fall, the market will improve, or the rise in the cost of living is only temporary, than it is to face the fact that things are not improving, that the jobless rate either continues to grow or fails to show real improvement, the market continues to waver as banks continue their deceitful practices, and the last time I checked, the cost of goods and services has steadily continued to climb while my paycheck stayed more or less the same – or shrank.
So no, my friends, we are not on our way out of this recession, no matter how many times you hear Ben Bernanke claim that the recession is over and 2010 is “a year of recovery.” We are NOT recovering. Not yet, anyway. Gravity is a bitch, my friends. And the economy is pulling a loop-the-loop.
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