Most of us have been worrying about the state of this country for some time, and not just politically. Impeachment is only part of it. Endless diaries and other blogs comment upon the economic malaise experienced and witnessed by most of the citizenry. Certain aspects of our infrastructure problems have been dissected separately even in this country's mainstream press. It's worrying, to put it mildly.
We all see the signs in our daily lives. The laundry list includes: unequal income distribution; crumbling infrastructure; deteriorating and unequal public schools; the depressed housing market; the stagnant job market; high rates of personal debt; the sky-high national debt; and far more. These are the problems: bridges and highways constantly under repair, levees that don't hold up in storms, railroads that need maintenance, steam pipes that burst; schools that are underfunded, overworked and understaffed air control tower staff; stagnant wages and an ever-rising cost of living; it just goes on and on and on. Add insult to injury, we know our tax structure is terribly unequal, weighted to give the uber-wealthy substantial breaks.
But when stories about our economic woes hit the international press, it's just mortifying. We're supposed to be one of the richest countries in the world. And we are, compared to a lot of other places. So what the hell is the problem?
Taxes are a good, and easy, place to start. But it doesn't end there, not by a long shot. Every single thing about our domestic policy has to change, now. (I'll get to impeachment eventually -- bear with me.)
The idea for this diary began Saturday night. Two stories late that night caught my eye, stories that came out in the British press. The additional diaries I read Sunday just added more data. The key theme that linked these two very different stories was the role of taxation in supporting public projects. But as I kept reading and thinking Sunday, I realized there is a hell of a lot more going on here than just bad tax policy and a crazy economy. The most warped versions of American values are showing up in our economy, and the social and cultural dissonances need redressing simultaneously with the economic strictures we need to embrace.
Let's take the first news report, courtesy of the BBC: the National Hurricane Center won't have a wind-measuring satellite in a few years. Why? Lack of funding. In other words, there's no money allocated to this particular project. The problem with losing the satellite in question is that we will lose a key instrument in detecting storms far out to sea.
Given the way so much of the US population clusters along the coastline, and how lousy our mass transit system is, evacuations and storm preparations need to begin more than just a few days before predicted landfall. Interstates turn into parking lots. As all the Florida Kossacks can attest, that state urges people to begin preparation very early in the storm season, long before a named storm pops up on the horizon. More than property is at risk, it's the millions in urban areas like Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa Bay, Daytona and the Space Coast, Jacksonville, Pensacola. Without this satellite, there will be even less time for people to get out of the way.
And it's not just our country who benefits from this satellite. The Indian Ocean, the tropical Pacific, the Caribbean -- all rely upon this instrument's ability to measure winds beyond the reach of the hurricane hunter airplanes. But supposedly we as a nation can't afford to replace it.
Then there was renaissance grrrl's food stamp diary. Now, I will give credit where it is due -- Congress did approve an increase in the benefit. But, as she said, that increase does not fully remedy the problem. A food stamp recipient is still going to wind up suffering malnutrition if they rely solely upon food stamps to purchase all their food needs.
Oh, it's true that a food stamp recipient can supplement their budget with items from the food pantry. But what's the quality of food there? Fresh is nutritionally best, but even those of us who have jobs or money in the bank have to be very careful about this portion of our food budgets. It's not dirt-cheap. Others in a number of threads have commented upon the transportation expense for produce sold in the grocery stores. There are farmers' markets, co-ops, and, in rural areas, farmer's roadside stands. But accessibility and affordability are problems yet to be overcome -- and a lot of these places won't take food stamps.
No, the question here is, how do we make sure that this program really works properly for all who need it? And where will we get the money to do so? Heaven help us if we need to expand it. After all, we're running a budget deficit, thanks to the Iraq war.
I won't even get into Nyceve's Murder by Spreadsheet series. Nor am I going to tackle explicitly our energy consumption, which got us into a war of choice, ferchrissakes, and mass transit issues. Honestly, if you haven't been keeping up with these issues, then shame on you. Enough said.
Certain aspects of the financial markets are incredibly unhealthy, as both the Bonddad Blog and Mike Larson's blog amply demonstrate. The story that most horrified me recently was Bonddad's blurb on employment. The only sector growing is the healthcare sector. When he says the private sector job market is in "freefall", I sit up and take notice. After all, I'm jobhunting. Look at that graphic Bonddad posted. Seriously. If that does not scare the crap out of you, I do not know what will.
Both Bonddad and Mike Larson comment on the Bear Stearns crisis and wonder what other nasty surprises are in store, and how much damage to the economy overall this sort of nonsense can cause. The dollar, another measure they watch, is a good barometer, and it keeps doing the Limbo. How low can it go? I'm no economist -- as I've commented to others, I'm a historian whose forte is literary analysis and textual deconstruction. But I can read graphs and histograms and bar charts, as these are very graphic representations, and the trend lines I've seen over the last several months do not reassure me.
Then there's the real estate market and the related lending crisis. The bad news there is national, and it's not getting better. Thanks to Mike Larson's blog, I found this link to a South Florida realty. Take a look at the bar charts for homes sold. This is hideous all across the price range. It's not just the luxury homes, starter homes aren't moving either. Now, I will say that Florida is a special case: there's the insurance storm -- it's extremely difficult to get homeowner's insurance, and the companies are in full flight from insuring anything on the coast. There's the inventory glut, the foreclosure rate and the newly tightened standards for lenders and borrowers that all contribute to a godawful real estate market.
I have other anecdotal evidence of the housing problems down there, and I understand it's as bad elsewhere in the country. One piece comes from my own family's quest to sell Mom's house. Another comes from the extended family, whose advice I've sought regarding the housing market in their parts of the state. For all that the market is abysmal, the housing stock all over is priced so high that the average, middle class worker cannot afford to live where they work. I've been told commutes of an hour or more are common, even two, just as in the greater DC area. Builders everywhere flat-out do not build what average workers need and can afford, they build what's most profitable. We need to make it economically feasible for them to build sustainable, affordable housing in our cities.
Yet, as the Guardian/Observer reports, we have a growing billionaires' club, a Richistani elite who spend obscene amounts of money on baubles, club memberships, and even martinis. Why? As the Guardian points out, it's the taxes, silly. They do not pay the same percentage we do, and much of this, as we all know, is legal because of the tax rollbacks and loopholes available to the uber-wealthy. This isn't news to most of us here -- although the scale of frivolous spending noted in the Observer article is mind-boggling. This is what happens when tax policy is set by George and The Cronies. Saying so is not class warfare -- hell, I was born into a very well-to-do extended family -- but these are US citizens, and they have all the duties and responsibilities of citizenship but don't pay a fair share of their incomes. Combine this with the overseas release of Michael Moore's SiCKO, and the Brits must think we are batshit insane for putting up with this nonsense. And you know what? They're right, but not for the obvious reasons of uber-rich self-indulgence. We literally cannot afford this two-tier economy anymore. The bills are due, as stonemason so clearly pointed out Friday. And whose economic policy deliberately fed this monstrosity at the expense of the entire nation? Do I really need to ask?
I initially missed stonemason's excellent bubble-economics-for-dummies diary, but got lucky Sunday and found a link to it. Do yourself a favor and read it carefully, for she makes an excellent case about how the credit bubble and the Iraq war are tied together. I will confess I've thought of leaving frequently, for I fear living in a country that loses its sense of justice and the rule of law. That's the biggest reason why I am such an ardent proponent of impeachment. But the reality is, we cannot afford to lose our citizenry to permanent emigration. We need all of our collective brains and ingenuity, and, yes, all of our tax money to tackle the problems we now face.
I will go further and pose a real quandary: for the sake of the nation, we have to impeach now, and yet, simultaneously, we cannot rush the process. Our Constitution and our economy cannot afford this disastrous Bush administration for another day, and yet Congress must move very carefully to keep from triggering an economic crisis of 1930s proportions. Bush and Cheney have painted us into a corner with the Iraq war and their fiscal policies. This is what I now believe Congress fears. To save both will take great skill, tremendous precision, and the luck of the angels.
How bad can it be? Remember what I said about renaissance grrrl's diary, above, about the nutritional security problems of food stamp recipients? If our entire economy goes belly up, this will happen to the working and middle class, and even the affluent (but not rich) professionals whose jobs disappear. The foreclosure rate will be far higher than it is now, and the bankruptcy laws no longer offer a decent path to financial recovery for financially distressed citizens. Given the way many of our cities and suburbs are constructed, transportation will become a horrific problem, for you can bet the price of gas will become unaffordable. Bloody revolutions have occurred in countries with this sort of social and economic disruption.
We all know that the Iraq war has sucked money out of the US treasury at a truly frightening rate. We know there's a credit bubble that is at the point of collapse. We also know that taxes have not kept pace with expenditures. We've done next to nothing to wean ourselves off imported oil, the true reason for the Iraq war. We've all screamed until we're hoarse about how there has been no sense of shared sacrifice, about the vanishing middle class, about the increasing gulf between the rich and the rest. How many of us have looked at individual pieces of the puzzle and thought, "What else is screwed up?" My opinion: damn near everything. We have to restructure this entire society's economy, before the crash really takes hold and we wind up in real trouble. And to do that, we have to realign the American mentality concerning prosperity, comfort, economic stability, and just maybe even the definition of success. Enough of this nonsense about individuals overcoming the system to live the great American Gilded Age dream. We have to come together to demolish a system that has become utterly cutthroat and stacked against the community, the nation as a whole. The stakes are too high to not do this. And we need to make our political system respond to these bedrock needs.
I am not advocating that we make it impossible for individual enterprise or raise impossible barriers to local, regional, interstate and international trade that is fair and easily accessible for small players. Far from it. But those of us with extraordinary financial means need to be far more disciplined and down-to-earth -- and less selfish -- about our personal expectations, so that everyone can thrive. We can't have universal healthcare without higher federal taxes, for example, and that will be our small businesses' salvation. We can't afford to wage resource wars for oil so some can drive gas-guzzling SUVs.
I am saying that we need as a nation to rethink what we stand for as a people, what sort of society we want to live in, what sort of economy we want to see evolve, and how we define American civic virtue. I will go farther. Our choice is stark, between remaining the bloody-handed empire we've become, just to maintain our mode of living, and turning away from that road to create a more sustainable, less wasteful, more thoughtful economy, society and material culture. A good place to start is with our taxation system, but that's only the beginning. Even that won't be possible without impeachment. We have to say no to the endless resource wars it will take to remain where we are economically, or we risk remaining unrecognizable to our friends, our allies, ourselves. We need a new sense of community, in our cities, states, the nation and eventually -- dare I say it? -- the world as a whole. Call it a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, a new neighborliness that goes beyond our little corners of the country. We really are all in this together, and if the US economy really goes into the toilet, even leaving the country will eventually be no escape. Too many other countries own pieces of our debt to remain unscathed. We can do this, if we are willing to make some sacrifices and restructure the very way we live and insist upon political leaders who follow our lead. We're all in this together, we have no time to waste, and we cannot afford to make mistakes.
****UPDATE****
I would like to thank stonemason for her addendum regarding the role of hedge fund investment in our disintegrating economy. Please see her substantive comment below. Essentially, what she's saying is that hedge funds have been used to roll up high-risk mortgages and other loans multiple times, each time raising the interest rates that leverage so many people right out of their homes. She also points out that even members of Congress have been playing the hedge fund game, and are thus complicit.
To synthesize her comment into my diary, I would like to add that Congress not only fears the coming crash, a number of them (probably not all) also fear being exposed as party to the destruction of our economy. These members are either stupidly or deliberately complicit. In other words, either they didn't get the proper education about the longterm consequences of their investments, or their greed got the better of them. And so, Bush and Cheney have these members of Congress by the short hairs. Bushco's betting that they won't impeach in order to delay the day of reckoning. But in reality, they can't stop it from coming. They can't even slow it down.
Hence, my second reaction. If members of Congress are in part responsible for the mess we're in, they can bloody well make amends by repairing the damage with appropriate legislation. These companies have profited on the vulnerabilities and miseries of others, and put the entire US economy at risk. This garbage has to stop. We need new laws that regulate the financial services industry, laws that send the strong message that greed and predatory lending behavior are social evils that will not be tolerated. And a great place to start is by investigating the crimes of Bush, Cheney and their cronies, with impeachment and removal from office as the grand finale.
Once again:
I N V E S T I G A T E A N D I M P E A C H