On the whole, the economy has been screwed up for over a decade....going back into the Bush administration. When the North American Free Trade deal went through.....it dissolved various small industries around every state and destroyed all of those $10-to-$15 jobs that existed. In my home county area where I grew up....the paper mill finally shut down. The 1,000 employees were all local guys who grew up....had only a high school diploma and were pulling in $40k a year starting out (union wage) and the guys in the 50’s were making $75k a year. Their lifestyle is gone, and most were stupid enough to spend every penny they ever made.
The 2008 economic fall? The recovery? Non-existent. Look around at business operations shut down and banks that used to exist which no longer exist. Folks run their cars another two to four years longer than they used. No one buys magazines at the grocery anymore. The ten-day vacation era is long gone, and the best you might hope for is one extended three-day weekend at some non-expensive hotel in Reno or Orange Beach.
It is a full-blown depression, but they made such a happy event out of it....that you just won’t admit it’s that bad. And the fact that Wal-Mart continues to make profits ought to tell part of the story.
It’s been screwed up longer than that. We lowered the tariffs in the 60’s. Our real wages have stagnated since then. It’s just that free market economies do a pretty good job of reallocating labor to either the next most productive thing, or to new technologies.
We’re to the point now where new technologies are instantly exported. We shored up the economy during the Bush administration by lowering interest rates and credit standards to help housing. That created a mini boom in refinancing jobs. But that party couldn’t last forever. And an oil price shock took the legs out from under it.
I think it's been screwed up longer than that...back to the 60's when we lowered the import tariffs. It's just the effects of the policy change weren't felt immediately. Real wages stagnated. Industries started leaving back then.
Those dang labor unions tried to warn us. But in the 60's and 70's, they were evil and greedy. Pushing for wage increases the rest of us could not afford made them the bad guys. They tried to warn us about the North American Free Trade deal too. But we wouldn't listen. Free trade would result in specialization and comparative advantage and everyone would be richer.
Republican Henry Hyde tried to tell us. He warned us that England had had their industries devastated by free trade.
It is a full-blown depression, ....that you just won’t admit it’s that bad.
I agree that it's bad. The unemployment certainly reached depression levels. But the term "depression" had a specific meaning and measure that most, not all, economists agreed on when I went to college. It was based on GNP and a depression needed a 10% decline. GNP only had 6% thanks in part to the FED pumping. (and possibly bad reporting)
Government receipts dropped 17%, but that reflects some tax policy changes in addition to the recession.