There might not be a plausible way out of our country’s financial mess. That’s the opinion of Kevin Phillips, a former republican strategist who works as an economics commentator. What are the main problems?
[P]hony Washington statistics and warped market measurements make it doubly hard to tell. The federal Consumer Price Index is already regarded by many Americans as a con job, and the press periodically quotes investors who state their belief that current U.S. inflation is really 6 to 9 percent a year, not the 2-4 percent the government alleges. I agree. On top of which, because the value of the dollar has dropped so far, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of March was not really 12,200, a number barely up from its 11,700 peak in 2000. If you measure the Dow in Swiss francs or euros, two strong currencies, it has already lost some forty percent of its 2000 value. Too many Americans live in a dream-world of economic misinformation. . . . Today, the economic negligence of Washington and Wall Street, more than two decades in the making, has led to a multi-dimensional crisis in which this country faces an unprecedented convergence of problems: unprecedented debt, tumbling home prices, reckless money supply expansion, growing inflation, insufficient and expensive oil, and an eroding dollar. Sadly, there may no longer be a plausible way out.
Using Y2K (2000) as a financial benchmark year is silly. This was a financial bubble year, much like early 1929. If you use 1995 as a benchmark, things don't look quite so bleak.
Not good, to be sure. But why must we lie with statistics?
I keep wondering why so many Republicans have supported Bush throughout his disastrous presidency, even though the writing has been on the wall for a VERY long time that his policies would send the U.S. careening into a financial black hole. Have his supporters already gotten such an embarassment of riches from his tax cuts that they just don't worry about it? Are they so obscenely greedy that they don't care about the debt load they are leaving for their children and grandchildren? I keep wondering how Bush's pals who have grandkids can stand to look at themselves in the mirror, knowing they have crippled the national economy, destroy the global environment and alienated nearly every other nation on the planet.