An in-depth report on inequality in America in The New York Times, Friday’s less-less-than-stellar jobs reports and gridlock in Congress combine to paint a grim picture of the U.S. economy.
“The United States remains among the richest countries in the world,” wrote Eduardo Porter in the NYT on Thursday, in Inequality in America: The Data is Sobering,
“Yet despite its riches, in many areas the United States looks surprisingly, depressingly backward.”
Porter cites measures such as infant mortality, life expectancy, teenage pregnancies, among others, in which the U.S. lags most other advanced economies – and even some developing nations.
Meanwhile the jobs report on Friday was illusory. The drop in the unemployment rate was not the result of robust job creation, but because so many people are leaving the labor force permanently – and thus not even being counted any more.
On Saturday, the NYT reported that because of the sequester, the number of federal workers forced onto short hours – or losing their jobs completely – soared to 199,000 in July, almost quadruple the number a year earlier.
All these are related: I pulled them together this morning at In the (K)now blog in Inequality makes U.S. look like a Third World Country
The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Congress, which left for its August recess on Friday without doing much of anything. It certainly has not fixed the budget mess, and it looks like there’s another showdown looming over the debt ceiling, with a government shutdown possible, yet again.
House Republicans are so intransigent they don’t care about what damage they are doing to the economy. Is this how they plan to win elections?
Or do they have a death wish?
That too, is on the blog: Is the GOP bent on self-destruction?
They seem to be heading down the road to perpetual irrelevance – but are doing grave damage to the country on their way to the bottom.
This is not a way to run a country – unless your goal is to run it into the ground.