9/11 mean anything to these fools?
9/11? Whuzat?
The fact that we came back so quickly from 9/11 is truly a testament to the greatness of this country
Despite the headlines, the Bush tax cuts frankly were rather puny for ordinary Americans (except large investors in dividend-bearing stocks and a few other politically favored categories). The tremendous malinvestment attendant to the dot-com bubble (peaked 1999) took some time to unwind. People sank huge amounts of money in non-profitable Internet ventures and relied upon the presumption that those investments would not diminish in worth. The economy has been in long-term decline since the 1973 oil bust (seriously).
The economy of 1999-2005 featured all of the following maladies:
* Bursts of price inflation, occasionally severe in 2000 and 2004/2005, interspersed with a period of cratering prices in 2001/2002.
* Energy crises, especially in California, which lacks adequate electricity, and the oil production ceiling in 2004/2005, and in natural gas in the unusually frigid 2000/2001 winter.
* Corporate accounting scandals and scandalously complicated legislation ostensibly intended to prevent them
* Restructuring of employment and skills of the labor force after the end of the dot-com bubble.
* The maturation of the Internet as a communication and commercial tool.
* Upheaval in the telecommunications sector, largely resulting from the Internet revolution and the popping of the dot-com bubble.
* Escalating costs in the overwhelmingly government-controlled education and health-care sectors.
The following factors, then evident, still now continue to drive the economy toward semi-permanent stagnation:
* Increasingly emasculating regulatory state, drastically curtailing industrial production, masked in the 1990s by the dot-com bubble with growth in largely unregulated technologies.
* Demographic trends, especially a lack of children and an excess of elderly. This factor proves especially severe in certain parts of the country. An increasing, youthful population provides a natural mechanism for economic expansion. As children age, they marry, procreate, and form new households, driving demand for goods and services. The elderly, however, increasingly exit the free-market system and find themselves in Medicare and Social Security.
9/11 mean anything to these fools?
For a split second I started to slam in with that intuitive comment. Then I thought I would probably be jumping in really late with this masterfully obvious thought.