How does this recession stack up to the Great Depression?
Not even close, most people would say. Where are the soup lines? The shantytowns full of homeless? We may soon find out what this economy really looks like if Congress doesn’t extend unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks.
Consider Mecklenburg County. More than 16,000 here will lose their unemployment benefits in the coming months if lawmakers don’t act, The Charlotte Observer reported. The reigning theory among conservatives is that we should cut them off so they’ll get off their butts and find a job. Government can’t afford to support them forever.
Unfortunately, the math on these people getting a job just doesn’t add up. Mecklenburg had 31,895 fewer total jobs — or number of people employed — in October than it did at its early-recession peak in April 2008, according to the state Employment Security Commission. As Meckdeck.com‘s Jeff Taylor points out, there are 57,000 fewer jobs in the region and 282,775 fewer jobs statewide.
Those are the true jobs numbers — unencumbered by silly statistical flourishes like unemployment rates and labor force size — and they blow.
Even with food stamps and other welfare benefits, these people would be homeless unless they still have savings or can move in with relatives. Waiting lists for Section 8 vouchers and public housing are years long. Further complicating matters is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s prediction on 60 Minutes that “it could be four, five years before we are back to a more normal unemployment rate.” Long-term Bernanke watchers know his face twitches when he lies, and twitch it did as he answered that question. A high school sophomore could figure out that Bernanke’s math doesn’t work on employment and Bernanke knows it.
The jobs aren’t coming back in the numbers they were. That’s because those jobs were dependent on or influenced by a sector of the economy that was fake. It all goes back to France. They’ve had double-digit unemployment there for decades, the long-accepted price of maintaining a massive welfare state (at least until one can’t borrow anymore, but that’s a different column.)
America tried to have massive government without the massive unemployment it causes by creating a faux real estate boom. Government printed money to buy and resell mortgages that shouldn’t have been created. If the government is going to buy up the mortgages lenders initiate or back them, why should lenders be stringent about credit when taking mortgage applications? Many of these mortgages were then carved up and sold to investors with an implicit stamp of approval that mortgage payers were financially solid, when in fact they had mediocre credit and a boatload of debt.
That’s a simplified version of the story, but this went on for 15 years. Along the way this flim-flam employed hourly workers, realtors, lawyers, mortgage brokers and CEOs who rode a tide of manufactured real estate demand.
Had the fake boom not been created by the government to pump up a dark corner of the economy, Americans would have realized that we, too, had adopted France’s model of economic stagnation with double-digit unemployment for what is supposed to be the greater good. This is why the jobs aren’t coming back. The economy has reached equilibrium, and with it the employment reality that France has openly embraced for decades. The façade has been stripped away. The American people just haven’t figured it out yet. That’s what makes Bernanke’s face twitch.
Now the borrowing that has propped this up here and abroad is careening out of control. Bloated governments worldwide are now facing that reality, and it isn’t going over well with the citizens setting fires in the streets.
Unlike many of those countries, America has an ace up its sleeve. We are outrageously, obnoxiously wealthy in natural resources. It’s a secret the media is good at keeping from most Americans, but our economy could boom again, this time for real, if we don’t put it off limits. Last year America surpassed Russia to become the world’s largest supplier of natural gas. That combined with our oil shale fields positions North America to “emerge as the world’s biggest supplier — and exporter — of reasonably cheap energy,” The Globe and Mail of Canada reported.
That is, if we are willing to go get it.
This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2010.
Unfortunately, with BHO as prez, we are not ‘willing to go get it” as his extension of the ban on off-shore oil drilling indicates.
I’d agree that the facade has been stripped away but I also think the American people are starting to figure out that the Fed is the biggest part of our flailing economy. If Ron Paul can get the Fed audited, I think the people will wake up even more.
It’s here to stay because of the Jewish elite serving the Rothschilds. This is ALL by design. People only have rights that you are willing to die for. All others are just extensions of temporary gratuity. The Jewish elite have almost destroyed this country so now they are moving on to Brazil, India, Russia and China. This is a tribal warfare because whites and white Jews. Everyone else in the planet just happened to be here and got in the way.