Notes of Concern…
…Jackson Blair
WHAT HAPPENED ?
Fortune magazine (Nina Easton) reports 20 per cent of all American men are “collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents.”
While there is no mention of how many women are also out of work I would not be at all surprised to find the percentage to be similar.
The article goes on to say
“American companies are creating millions of jobs. The trouble is, they’re not in America, which is an increasingly uncompetitive place to do business.”
Yet another columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, who writes for the Globe & Mail was even more to the point:
“The U.S. spends way more than it raises in revenue and, therefore, borrows massively; it imports more than it exports; it has an almost double-digit unemployment rate (9.2%); it has the highest degree if inequality in the Western world; its public pension plan isn’t adequately financed…systematically Americans have refused to tax themselves at levels commensurate with their spending. The result of this collective irresponsibility has finally caught up with them.”
If the current economic disaster in this country has not hit you or someone in your family you are very fortunate. Since no solution has been found or even appears as a distant possibility, after the recent unimaginative, weak and embarrassing solution to the debt-ceiling crisis, you should enjoy what may well be short-lived good fortune.
The prices of almost everything are high. The ability of almost everyone to pay the prices demanded is falling.
Many people who used to be gainfully employed are now unemployed and surviving on benefits the government might yet cut. Those who successfully completed the course of a working life and are living on fixed incomes are now in danger of having their benefits cut.
People who planned well and invested to supplement their retirement are watching the returns on their investments crash and burn. Prudent people who paid off their mortgages thinking the value of their homes would be a financial survival net are now living without a net as the value of homes plummet.
I could go on with this litany of woe but what I really want to say is that we did not get here because of Barak Obama. Frankly, we didn’t get here because of George Bush. You can look a long way back into our history to discover how we got here.
We got here because people who needed votes learned early in their careers that the way to get us to vote for them was for them to give us what we wanted. This gave birth to entitlement programs where the government gives us money they actually do not have while we refuse to increase any of the tax money we give them.
They are in a bind my friends. We demand they keep giving us our “stuff” and we threaten their jobs as our representatives if they ask us for more taxes.
WE THE PEOPLE caused the financial crisis and WE THE PEOPLE can fix it.
Everybody needs to step back and accept that we must expect less “stuff” from our government and we must be willing to pay more for the “stuff” that is required to live in freedom and safety.
For the record, I am not absolving our representatives from any share of this burden. Because so many are weak and greedy they have not provided leadership.
President Obama articulated the problems when he was a candidate but he has provided no leadership that would get us out of this mess. President George Bush campaigned on ideas for domestic programs that never happened because of our unexpected need to fund various wars and he certainly did not improve our economy on his watch. Like Obama, he did not have a very good handle on economics and neither of them really had a clue how to turn a company around, salvage a business enterprise, or return a profit in real life.
So I think we should blame ourselves.
We elected these folks. Next time around lets put management, finance, administration and proven leadership potential higher on our “wish list” for a prospect for president.
In order to do this we will have to get beyond the “8x10 glossy” handsomeness of a candidate, his oratorical skills, where he went to college (and how he got into the school) and totally ignore any of his promises that are not based in verifiable experience prior to his candidacy.
Then, with a little bit of luck, we might actually regain the respect we have lost throughout the world.
It is a big hill to climb.
But it is not too big of a hill for a “stepper.”
And Americans are “steppers!”
