Published In CommPRO,biz 2013.11.26

 

Ignoring the Obvious

We are five years into a worldwide recession. And while the United States is very sluggishly gaining ground, much of the rest of the world is sliding further into the abyss. Germany has parlayed a heavily subsidized manufacturing sector into the best of a bad lot. The rest of the Euro block is gasping for air. Yet many in Europe and in the United States seem determined to defy history in dealing with this downturn.

The only folks in America who are doing well are at the top; up and running on the no-strings-attached-taxpayer-funded bailouts. The stock market is soaring, the too-big-to-fail banks that triggered the recession, the super rich, big business, they’re all singing happy days are here again. Meanwhile, the middle class, small business, and the poor are left struggling. The solution, we are told, is austerity, a focus on our nation’s deficit. This plan from the folks who created the deficit with the first wars in our history that we made no effort to pay for as they were fought, and a tax cut.

The economic cancer we gave Europe has ravaged the continent. Especially those who have entered the job market in the five years since its onset. Youth in some European nations face 50% unemployment, and even those who are working are grotesquely underemployed. They are in a way a lost generation. Many who have advanced degrees, masters, even doctorates, are lucky to find menial work. Many are in their late twenties, some in their thirties; robbed of their future, their hopes for career and family lost.

History teaches a very different lesson. Every single economic downturn since the modern economic age dawned with the industrial revolution has been overcome by government intervention. Let’s look at recent history. America went into WW2 deep in debt. The debt had increased by the war’s end in spite of astronomical wartime taxes. Then we spent on the GI bill, educating returning veterans and subsidizing their home ownership. We rebuilt our former enemies’ homelands and hardly took a breath before the war in Korea. After he got us out of that war President Eisenhower went on a spending spree building our interstate highway system. At the time he made it out to be needed in case we had to move a lot of troops around in a hurry, but it was really a way to boost the economy. High end tax rates for the very rich soared to 90%. And America boomed.

In contrast we are allowing our roads and infrastructure to decay. Education is the last thing on our minds; we are forgoing the future, following a path of proven failure. Those few who are benefitting from this folly will find that it can’t go on forever, it is unsustainable. As our roads and bridges break down, as the economy decays, they too will find their positions in decline. They’ll discover – perhaps too late – that the ethically and morally wanting path they have chosen, is economically wanting for them as well.