Knut,
I am directing this at your response(#27), not because I wish to attack you personally, but because if I take what you say at face value(ie. knowing nothing about you, your background or your values), I simply could not disagree more.
I like listening to and reading Paul Krugman, he is a feisty jovial fellow who is really good at scoring partisan votes for Liberal Democrats. But the depth of his analysis makes a shallow pond after a long hot summer look deep. His contributions to economic theory rank him right up their with another of America’s great Nobel Prize winning and utterly incompetent economists-Milton Friedman.
I wonder if you learned in graduate school economics that all of the models used, the entirety of the econometric methodology and that the ontological basis of modern economic theory are absolutely and unequivocally bankrupt, not only socially, but morally as well. Some how I doubt that was taught in grad school economics.
Paul Krugman and many liberal elites keep calling out for more and larger stimulus.
Tell me something: Do you give a shot of adrenaline to patient dying of festering cancers, where the patients own cells are actively destroying each other?
No, the last thing we need is another stimulus. What we need will undoubtedly involve government borrowing, but the goal cannot be to return to where we were prior to this slight aberration in the housing market in 2007. Nor can it be to return to the glorious days of Clinton, which produced all of the deregulation that caused this depression.
Americans used their home equity as an ATM to the tune of trillions of dollars of credit. Yet the greatest surplus of credit the world has ever seen did nothing to ameliorate the then current unemployment, the disgraceful poverty in which so many millions of Americans have been forced to live and the profound economic disparity of American society. Instead Americans bought more houses, more cars, more HDTV’s, more Tivo’s and more I-phones and computers. Me. Me. Me. Me. Americans built gated communities to keep the restless downtrodden far away from delusional middle class (dys)utopias. Americans insured themselves so thoroughly that medical costs, acting like a parasite on the collective host of American society, raised costs so high that 40+ million Americans could not afford basic health care.
Americans left whole communities to twist in the wind, or even worse to simply rot(hello New Orleans). Americans allowed their infrastructure to degrade to a level that is more comparable to nations of the South than to other nations of the North, all the while exploiting workers of the South for cheap consumer goods(hello NAFTA), further impoverishing the South so that Americans could merrily shop away at Walmart. And Americans waged outright war on the lower class, turning everything that in any way served the common needs of Americans into for-profit private corporations and outsourced almost all public service of our government and military.
Americans drove ever bigger cars, consumed ever more electricity, polluted more and more and worked hard to sabotage international environmental progress. And Americans killed and killed and killed, each other, and probably close to a million Iraqi’s and Afghan’s and Yemenis and insert-Islamic-state, acting as the worst form of terrorists the world has ever seen(you look more like the man you hate….).
No the American patient does not need a stimulus. Entire industries(payday lenders) have bloomed which do nothing but feed on poverty, always increasing it, for therein lies their profit. Banks became the middle class equivalent of payday lenders for the middle class. And the financial industry treated Americans as if they were the parasites on the backs of the poor billionaires.
No, stimulus is not what is needed. Heavy doses of chemotherapy and medical marijuana is more like what this American patient needs. Consumption as an economic model has failed. Increased demand will not put Americans back to work-it will lead to more off-shoring and outsourcing.
A purging of the financial industry would be a good first step towards recovery. Nationalizing the American health care system would be another good step. Tax rates for the top 2% similar to what America had in the 1960’s could go along way towards righting the wrongs of economic distribution, but let us not forget that in the 1960’s there was nothing equitable about economic distribution, just ask our African American friends.
Of course my suggestions are absurd, but not nearly as absurd as to believe that Paul Krugman’s advice and a return to status-quo-ante is a solution that is going to return this American patient to any kind of healthy vibrancy.
The Worst American City to Live In? It's One You've Never Heard Of
AOL's money website WalletPop composed a list of the worst American cities to live in based on the climate, unemployment and foreclosure figures, crime stats, etc. Naturally, Detroit and LA both made the cut. But there were some surprises, too.
One thing you probably wouldn't have expected: The No. 1 city on the list is El Centro, California. Where? It's a city just across the Mexican border with a 27.5 percent unemployment rate, which is the highest in the country. So, yea, that sounds pretty crappy.
The other cities we could probably have rattled off just by thinking of the places that novelists and screenwriters use when they need a locale that sounds depressing. That includes the likes of Cleveland, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, and Memphis, which round out the list. As for New York City, it doesn't appear on the top 10. Congrats: It's no longer the go-to symbol for urban decay!
[Image of a house in Detroit via Getty]
Send an email to Brian Moylan, the author of this post, at brian@gawker.com.
eric seiger
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