These are interesting times that we live in. We are told that Greece has on several occasions nearly precipitated another hit to the economy as they've refused to comply with stringent requirements placed on them by the EU. Meanwhile, there is very little investment going on in the United States, and yet if you look at the numbers, some people are doing incredibly well during this recession.
The very rich are in fact doing incredibly well off their investment returns. It's the poor and middle class which are in trouble. Manufacturing has been down for awhile, and the 'financial services' industry has retreated to close the size it should have been in the first place. We are told that attempts to get people to spend their cash and reinvest are failing, although the reality is that most of the money seems to be going overseas.
Over the last thirty years, wages have been declining for the middle class, but the credit card industry rose and allowed people to live as if their income had grown like it once did. In other words, they borrowed money, where before they saved it. And in various corners of the United States, you have a very small number of people holding the debt on all this paper and collecting interest on it. Having watched the economy explode, they don't feel like moving their money out of the shelters they've created for it, which are usually tax-free.
It's a new kind of feudalism we are seeing now. A huge number of people are working to keep an incredibly small number of people in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, and many in that last group literally do absolutely nothing. I don't mean close to nothing, like some easy corporate job which involves having a few meetings a week and staying up all night making deals, and then calling that work. I mean that they don't even have to talk about business.
They have large sums of money stored away in 401k's and the Cayman Islands, and they have an accountant who handles it for them so they don't really need to know what any of these terms mean. Meanwhile the middle class grows smaller and lives worse under the weight of all that debt, and most of these people are only angry at the left because they don't understand economics. They think they are poor because someone gave a black person welfare.
You could wipe welfare off the budget, and it wouldn't fix anything.
It's a strange world we live in. It's a world filled with people who don't understand economics, don't understand law, and don't have good critical reasoning skills. And yet those people are the ones who meet every four years to elect a President, and every two to elect Congress.
Education is the basis of a society. Without that, you have nothing. And the tragedy is, we will definitely be devastating a lot of schools all over the country with massive budget cuts and Teachers will be sent home. It's coming, and it's coming despite the fact that the education system was already suffering from massive systemic problems
Some of them are even architectural. There are a lot of decaying, mold-infested buildings out there that need to be replaced. When we had the money, we didn't feel like doing it, and now it's going to be even harder.