Towards the end of this week’s column titled, First question on the middle class, Associate Editor Gil Smart observes:
“For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn’t make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that allowed us to earn a bit more every year. … That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the country will be like without it is not quite clear. ‘It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S.’ ”
“Under our ruthless (yet virtuous!) system, that’s the way it is. Davidson himself writes,
WATCHDOG: As we have observed before, Smart gets more knowledgeable and insightful as time goes by and today’s column of jarring observations is certainly among his best. In reponse, here are two things that we can “imagine”:
1) Fast forward three decades. By then much of the cheap labor in Asia will have been absorbed into their countries’ economies and be receiving wages, if not as high as in the West, are significant enough to make their products and services for less economical. Rising world prosperity will ‘float all ships’ and American families will again be growing in affluence. So, at worse, it isn’t a matter of ‘if’, but rather of ‘when.’
2) But, as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead” so let’s look at what can be done now to improve our situation. Do we have high speed trains? Do we have modern airports? Do we have a first class educational system? Is our health care system rated among the top fifteen in the world? The answers to all of the questions are no.
Also, at a time of worldwide fuel shortages, are we turning enough arable ground into cultivation? Perhaps some of our population should be headed back to the farms and related industries.
Our big problem isn’t due to worldwide influences. Our problem is our being bogged down in steep recession and a Congress that refuses to enact necessary stimulus to get us back to a decent level of employment.
Pray for an Obama landslide, carrying both houses of Congress. We will then get the fiscal stimulus for which, since 2008, the vast number of economists and the Federal Reserve have been begging. Then taxes will flow into the public coffers, social safety net expenses will correspondingly decrease, we can again balance the budget (as was done during the latter Clinton years), the ratio of National Debt to Gross National Product will shrink to a safer percentage, and , to borrow an analogy from Smart, the wind will again be at our backs.
