As the US spirals downward, a growing percentage of Americans seem too willing to turn a blind eye

[Joanne98]

For OpEdNews: Richard Clark - Writer

According to Bob Herbert, writing in the N.Y. Times, in the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. Many of these lost jobs went to the immigrants and most of the others either went overseas, were replaced by ever advancing computerization and automation, or simply disappeared because employers now know that people who are lucky enough to have decently paid jobs are more than willing to work harder and longer in order to keep them, thereby allowing cost-conscious and profit seeking employers to lay off some of their insufficiently motivated co-workers.

What this shows is not that we should discriminate against foreign-born workers, but that the U.S. needs to somehow develop a full-employment economy that provides jobs for all who want to work, at pay rates that enable the workers and their families to enjoy a decent standard of living. In other words, a resurrection of the American dream.

Right now, however, nothing close to that is happening. Rather, the opposite is happening.

The human suffering in the years that will be required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense. And that suffering will only be made worse if the nation continues to embark upon a totally misguided crash program of deficit reduction that in the short term will undermine any recovery, and that in the long term will make true deficit reduction that much harder to achieve. (Why harder to achieve? Because reduced wages mean reduced tax receipts.)

The wreckage from the recession and the nation's mindlessly destructive policies in the years leading up to the recession is all around us. We still don't even have the money to pay for the wars that our politicians and corporate elite insist on having us fight year after year. And they have neither the will nor the common sense to either raise taxes to pay for the wars, or stop waging them. So we just keep borrowing, internationally, from the rich, and even from our own Federal Reserve, which essentially prints up the additional trillions, as required. But for how much longer will our creditors let us get away with this? In other words, for how much longer will they be willing to be paid back in dollars that will obviously soon be worth so little? (The more dollars that chase a limited number of goods, the less that each of those dollars buys.)

http://www.opednews.com/articles/As-the-US-spirals-downward-by-Richard-Clark-101121-500.html

[Speck Tater]

1. So that's all we need, eh? Magically create high-paying jobs for everybody!

But where will all that wealth come from? Money is easy; just print it. Real wealth, however, is limited by the resources available. We can't just wave a magic wand and create abundance for everyone. There are too many people and too few resources.

Consider that one of the greatest periods of widespread prosperity in Western history was the period immediately following the devastation of the black plague. When population fell, resources became plentiful compared to population. There was prosperity in the wake of World War II as well.

But now, population has ballooned beyond the carrying capacity of the planet so prosperity for all is a physical impossibility. Only a sharp decline in population will result in a return to widespread prosperity. And if we don't control population in a reasonable way, then nature will control it for us, in the most unpleasant way possible.

[Sirveri]

2. Take it from the rich. The top 10% has 70% of the wealth in this country.

If they don't give it up willingly then the government can peacefully compel them to give it up for the benefit of the whole.
If the government isn't willing to do that then eventually the poor and oppressed will simply rise up and force them to.

[Speck Tater]

3. If you take all the money from everyone in the whole country and divide it up evenly among everyone

Then a year later the people who used to be rich will be rich again and the people who used to be poor will be poor again. You can't make any headway by giving people money. You need to provide decent jobs and good education. It needs to start with more income equality, but that, by itself, is not the whole solution. And even with income equality there is still the problem that there are not enough natural resources to sustain the kind of growth necessary for everyone to be prosperous. Those days are over and they aren't coming back. Civilization itself is in terminal decline and wishing won't change that inconvenient truth. Modern technological civilization will prove to be nothing more than a brief blip on the radar screen of history.

[w4rma]

4. What? Even if anyone wanted to do that, what you say is absolutely untrue.

In fact, the folks who hold the wealth right now are pretty incompetent and some are thoroughly evil.

[Speck Tater]

5. Oh really? What fantasy land do you live in?

Poor people who win millions in the lottery end up broke again within a year or two. The pattern is so predicable it's almost a joke.

The wealthy truly ARE incompetent at things that really matter, but they are very competent at taking money from the stupid and the gullible, which makes up about 90% of the population. So the 90% stupid and gullible end up giving all their money to the 10% financially savvy fraudsters, who all end up rich again in no time at all.

[Sirveri]

6. One idea is that it would stimulate demand to the point that unemployment would vanish.

However nobody would want the jobs because everyone would have so much money, so people would only do jobs they actually wanted to do. Could lead to hyperinflation of labor prices, or possibly a wealth drain as all our cash flies to China and Central America to buy basic goods.

That said, I wasn't suggesting that. I was merely suggesting a proper tax distribution to discourage excessive wealth accumulation. Failing that however I'm sure the poor will eventually rebalance the wealth distribution themselves, history is replete with examples.

[GOPBasher]

7. You make good points, but I disagree.

I agree that population needs to be controlled; I'm not arguing against that at all. But I disagree with your claim that prosperity is impossible with our current population. (That may be the case at some point, but I don't think it is now.)

Productivity has sky-rocketed for the past thirty years. As long as production outgrows population growth, people should prosper. The problem is that all of our wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2%. If it was more evenly distributed, we would be enjoying tremendous prosperity right now.

[former9thward]

8. The productively rise is due to technology and machines.

Not because of people per se. That technology and machines are owned by the wealthy and that is the reason wealth has risen in the upper class and declined in the lower classes.

[GOPBasher]

10. Right. And wealth can be redistributed. But the point is, we can create the wealth. n/t

[bhikkhu]

9. Perhaps its more of a "steady-state" than a downward spiral

The article is pretty much right on, but the title could use some work (as seems to be the case so often - titles are chosen to provoke). I would hope we can transition to a perspective where a stable economy is not seen as a catastrophe, and that something other than everything getting bigger perpetually could serve as a goal.