Economic Depression
Posted
March 28, 2008 at
9:01 am by
Rita
I am beyond frustrated. I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and I laugh along with them, but it seems that there is the impression that if we don’t keep laughing at it, we’ll all just burst into tears.
I try to stay away from the mainstream news channels, because of my tendency to get migraines. All that abrupt flashing and shouting and ultra-vivid colors and trying to follow the straw men and red herrings and meaningless stories that don’t have points, but are shouted with urgency anyway. I’m surprised epileptics aren’t suing. I do watch The News Hour With Jim Lehrer and the BBC World News on our BBC America cable channel. So, I’m not ignorant of the news, I’m just choosy about who I let into my livingroom to give it to me.
Regardless of where you get your news—Fox or BBC or Stephen Colbert, it’s impossible to ignore or deny that we’re in trouble. You couldn’t avoid hearing about the housing foreclosures if you tried. The war in Iraq is going on and on. Our dollar value is dropping while prices go up. Everyone I know is afraid for their jobs. Yet a handful of people I know still plan to vote Republican this coming election. I do not understand it.
I feel like every quarter is a game of roulette with a loaded revolver. He didn’t lose his job this cycle, whew. We get to keep our house and make plans for the next few months anyway. I feel all the time like it’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.” I read on the CNN news page yesterday about a woman who went from earning $70K a year to lining up for groceries at a food bank within a matter of months. I can see that. We’re all just trying to hang on to what we’ve got hoping some miracle will swoop in and turn the wind around.
Personally, I’m putting all my eggs in Obama’s basket.
I have a Canadian friend who says that since American politics affects the rest of the world so hugely, everyone across the globe should get a vote. As an American I really cringe at that. But, as a human being, witnessing how badly we fucked things up in the past 8 years, I can’t help but entertain the idea, just for kicks. What would our presidential lineup look like if the world helped elect our leaders? It’s preposterous of course. We can’t eliminate cheating within our own borders (which is the only logical explanation for W in 2000. Jimmy Carter believes it, and so do I), so how could we possibly manage an honest world-wide election? But, it’s still interesting to think about. More interesting than reality, really.
We have a house that’s now worth a fraction of what we’re paying for it. My husband has student loans which are going to take twice as long to pay off as we anticipated because how can you expect the kinds of raises that have historically accompanied his position when you’re just happy to keep working? The PhDs in India aren’t asking for raises! My son’s charter school is having money problems because charter schools are funded by the state, not the district, and our (Republican) governor has slashed state funds for education consistently since gaining office in 2002. We live quarter to quarter, hoping to not have send my husband to live in an apartment on the east coast and send his paychecks home to us to pay the mortgage. Hoping that we won’t have to give up the house or a car, hoping that our son’s school will stay open next year. Our health care premiums raised in such a way that when compared with the small increase in pay my husband received, he actually received a decrease in what he brings home.
This is the American Dream right now. The American middle class has collective nocturnal fantasies about not losing all we’ve worked for. Those of us who weren’t wily enough to cash in on the plummeting housing market, or the booming oil prices, well we’re just fucked. But, how many of us who have been fucked are going to bend over and ask for sloppy seconds from McCain?
I wish I could be like my Republican friends and just be happy for those who had inside connections and are now billionaires because of the war. Just be thrilled with the idea that those who made a literal killing off of the foreclosures of others might toss a shiny coin down our way to spend at Wal Mart, and consider my own personal sacrifices to be for the greater good. I’d even be content with a mild case of denial, to just be able to find a way to spin this so it wasn’t really this administration’s fault at all. Find a way to link it all back to Bill somehow, and believe this his leaving office in 2000 was just a narrow escape from the inevitable, leaving this administration to shoulder what would have happened anyway. See? They should have let Gore keep his votes, then that line of thinking would be more believable. Or I wish I had some unreachable ideal to base my entire vote on, like abortion or homosexuality to oppose. As long as a candidate gives lip service to that one thing and I vote for that person, then I am absolved from any feelings of responsibility for whatever horrors that person commits afterwards.
But, I don’t. So in the time between now and Obama, I will occupy myself with various plan B options for when we do fire that revolver and the chamber is full. I’ll watch Comedy Central, wipe my cheeks and pretend that the tears are because Jason Jones is just so God damned funny.
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37 Responses to “Economic Depression”
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31. Rita
May 29, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
[quote comment="166926"] If you’re a tad intrigued, check out Revelations in the New Testament. There’s a blatant reference to God giving the power of rule/control to one nation, over 3/4’s of the Earth and one day that great Nation would fall. [/quote]
We better stay the hell away from China, then huh?
32. ninja weiner nah nah
May 29, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
I am a white woman. I HATE it when people assume that I will vote for Clinton because I am a woman. AND, it does not make me a racist if I choose not to vote for Obama. I will vote for the person who I think will do the best job. Anyone who votes purely on race or gender is an idiot.
Personally, I would like a do over…all new canidates, please!
33. Rita
May 30, 2008 @ 6:54 am
[quote comment="167048"]I am a white woman. I HATE it when people assume that I will vote for Clinton because I am a woman. AND, it does not make me a racist if I choose not to vote for Obama. I will vote for the person who I think will do the best job. Anyone who votes purely on race or gender is an idiot.
[/quote]
That’s the truth. I mean, you couldn’t PAY me to vote for Condoleezza Rice
34. Don
July 1, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
Life is a struggle. It has always been so.
Individuals perish but mankind some how survives.
21st century Americans live with a sense of
entitlement brought about by post WWII economic
prosperity. That game is over. This is the
deline of the American Empire. Expect a similar
decline in living standard. That’s the reality
of the situation!
35. John Petty
October 24, 2008 @ 4:00 pm
Here is an article about the fed chairman during the time of the Great Depression and what he thought caused it. The same thing is happening again for the same reasons. Please read:
In Review: America’s Most Egalitarian Banker
Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
At the start of the Great Depression, Marriner Eccles hardly seemed someone who might lead a charge against the economic orthodoxies that justified grand hoards of private fortune. By the early 1930s, after all, the Utah-born Eccles had become the top banker in the Mountain West, the organizer of the first multibank holding company in the United States.
But Eccles had also come to understand, after watching the great speculative bubbles of the 1920s pop into massive misery, that prosperity — to endure — needs to be shared. Eccles began speaking out on that theme, shortly after the Great Depression began, and soon caught the attention of the early New Dealers.
In 1933, Eccles would become an assistant secretary of the treasury. A year later, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board. He would become Board chair in 1935 and remain in that central position for the next 13 years. No one individual, over those years, had more of an impact on economic policy in the United States.
Looking back on those years, in his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles would do his best to explain the impact he set out to make. Mass production, he noted at the outset, demands mass consumption, but people can’t afford to consume if the wealth an economy generates is concentrating at the top.
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, that concentrating was accelerating. A “giant suction pump,” charged Eccles, “had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.”
“In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Eccles observed, “the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
Sound familiar? The decade of the 1920s that Eccles describes in his 1951 memoir comes across today as eerily familiar. Then as now, the U.S. economy was floating on a sea of debt.
Then as now, inequality was hollowing out the nation. Eccles put the matter bluntly: “Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy.”
How would Eccles have reacted to our current debt-ridden, war-torn economy? We can’t, of course, know for sure what Eccles would do. But we do know what he did. In 1942, during World War II, a high-powered team of New Deal officials that included Eccles proposed to President Roosevelt that “a ceiling of fifty thousand dollars after taxes should be placed on individual incomes.”
In our current dollars, this $50,000 ceiling would equal about $700,000. What did FDR do with the Eccles proposal? He turned around and asked Congress to place a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000.
Congress would eventually set the nation’s top tax rate at 94 percent on all income over $200,000, and that top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the greatest period of middle class prosperity in U.S. economic history.
In 2005, the latest year with statistics available, America’s leading hedge fund managers and the rest of the nation’s top 400 income-earners faced a top tax rate of 35 percent. They actually paid, after loopholes, just 18.2 percent of their incomes in tax.
Marriner Eccles would not approve.
Stat of the Week
In the two decades between 1986 and 2005, America’s top 1 percent of taxpayers saw their share of the nation’s income jump from 11.3 to 21.2 percent. Over those same years, the federal income taxes the top 1 percent paid dropped by an equally stunning margin, from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005, the most current year with IRS stats available. Taxpayers needed to report at least $364,657 in 2005 to enter the top 1 percent.
About Too Much
Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org
36. john
August 19, 2009 @ 10:20 am
This is valuable information. More is needed like what we are doing here and on my site to get the word out.
37. THELOUISIANAEXPLORER
September 4, 2009 @ 7:15 am
Good post, this is very good information. Things were bad, real bad in the 20s and 30s and history does have a way to repeat itself. There’s a book just out that identifies an individual that sacrificed everything to support the laboring class in Louisiana and across America during the Great Depression. He took on the Roosevelt administration and fought the Banckhead act and called for the removal of Hugh Johnson as the head of the NRA. When he finally dismembered Governor Leche’s former Long organization he became to controversal for Roosevlet. Read more about the man at http://www.thomastfieldsjr.com opr Google “I Called Him Grand Dad”. Names such as Long, Roosevelt, Farley and Lech are found throughout the writing.