Having talked about almost every other goddam embarassing thing that no one in their right mind would talk about in public, because somebody needed to say it, I'm not going to back away from talking a bit more about this one: the way grim levels of personal and student debt keep people from settling down and having families.
The issue ticks me off almost as much as who's currently addressing it, which happens to be the loathsome Family Research Council. Here's the title of an FRC lecture scheduled for this coming Friday:
"The Crushing Burden Of Student Loans On Family Formation For Generation X+"
A-frakking-men.
On top of the consumer credit burden the typical American has racked up to compensate for stagnant wages, years of budget cuts have left the last 10-15 years worth of US students starting their working life under a mountain of debt. It takes its toll.
Now here's the thing, I know that neither the Family Research Council, nor the creepy, sheet-sniffing Tony Perkins character who runs it, nor the Republicans they support, give a damn about people like me and they have no real solutions to offer for our situations. They all purport to hate college graduates as much as they hate uppity women and brown people and gays, and they have hated themselves into a state of deep, deep stupid. But they'll at least bloody well talk about this, while Democrats won't.
So in view of saving this party of bank-licking dimwits from their own ignorance, let's talk.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary, "The Recovery Myth", warning about the risks of ignoring longer-term economic prospects for short term upticks. This diary continues that theme (and is fully in tune with Mike's recent diary, "We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package").
A rising tide of voices are warning that optimism over a coming recovery--the promise of "green shoots"--is looking increasingly questionable. Typical of these are Dean Baker's "The Green Shoots Are Dead", hence my diary title. The subhead to his article explains:
The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection
Krugman argues along similar lines in his July 9 column, "The Stimulus Trap"
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan - this was before Inauguration Day - some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration's economic stewardship. There's now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed....
In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery....
This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.
Meanwhile, Bonddad is on a counter-contrarian kick at DKos, writing "The Economic Free Fall is Over", which I believe is instructively mistaken. It's true in one sense, but it misses the point in a larger one (after all, FDR reversed the downward plunge of the GDP within his first two years, but unemployment remained crushing until WWII came along). More on all of these viewpoints--and more viewpoints as well--on the flip.
The U.S. economy just keeps getting worse. Given the absolute pummeling the job market has taken over the past five months, we're going to need some much stronger medicine than policymakers are currently proposing. It's increasingly clear that President Obama's stimulus plan was devised for a far milder downturn, and this week we received further evidence of the recession's high human cost.
In my last diary, "What Does Fiscal Responsibility Look Like?", I tried to provide an example of how one might begin laying out a sane discussion of economic policy. But, of course, in the world we live in today, that sort of thing virtually never happens. So here I want to do a 180, and take a snapshot look at an example of why that's the case, why our economic discourse is so totally crazy.
Going back to my old ways, you know I would say it's an example of hegemony--the existing institutions that shape everyday reality for people also shape the limits of what they can think or see in extraordinary circumstances as well. And so it is that the daily repetition of news sources like CNBC--however ludicrously inaccurate and inept they may be--have an outsized influence, just at the very moment when everything they stand for, every assumption they rely on has been cast in the utmost doubt.
Think of it like high school. The only place where the right answer matters is on the test-if there. In the hallways, the locker room, the football field, the cafeteria, everywhere else, the only answer that matters is what the cool kids say it is. And who's cool? Whoever has the power-one way or another. Being wrong doesn't even begin to register in the equation.
This is what's been behind the all-out effort to rewrite economic history (so that FDR caused the Great Depression), along with basic empirical facts (such as the fact that poor folks spend everything that comes to them, while rich folks don't, and thus stimulus spending that reaches the poor is far more efficacious than that which reaches the rich). Perhaps these inconvenient facts can't be changed, but they can be clouded, they can be rendered "debatable," simply because people who want to make these facts go away are not about to go away themselves.
It's not so much that they have access. It's more like they are access. This is the larger context behind CNBC and it's merry band of trolls, constantly yelling that the stock market is falling, and it's all Obama's fault! It matters not one whit that the stock market falling is far from the main show. GDP, unemployment, mortgage foreclosure rates, consumer confidence-all these are significantly more important than the Dow Jones Average. But they aren't up there on the ticker, changing moment by moment for all America to see. To watch as if it were an oracle source of omnipotent wisdom.
And, of course, it's not just CNBC. Because the entire media conglomerate-o-sphere is all so tightly wired together. Hence, on Tuesday's Hardball uber-troll Chris Matthews bloviates, counterposing hard facts-folks aren't buying the absurd fiction that Obama's to blame-with hot-headed fantasies....
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
The U.S. economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs in January, bringing total losses in the past three months over 1.5 million—more than the entire population of Philadelphia. If there ever was a good time to mend the tattered U.S. social safety net, it's now. While unemployment benefits and food stamps remain relatively uncontroversial, basic welfare continues to be neglected by the general media and vilified by the right. And as of this moment, a responsible welfare program is needed more than at any point since the 1930s.
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