Is the Sky Falling?

Yes Chicken Little, the sky really is falling. Unemployment is at its highest point in twenty-six years. Money is so tight that in a counterintuitive move even the unemployment office had to lay people off. Now the entire country is having a going out of business sale. It really hit me when my girlfriend and I spotted “Everything Inside 70% Off” signs in the windows of all the fancy shops in Soho. When the Prada boutique looks like a 99cent store, something’s not right.

In a Washington Post column on February 4^th President Obama tried to clue us in on the need for immediate action. In his eloquent, if preachy, writing style, Obama made a plea for money to fund energy research, schools, and rebuild the country’s roads and bridges.  He took to the editorial pages as a way to reach out from behind the Democrat-Republican grudge match that’s fucking everything up. What a relief to know that in times of crisis our Commander in Chief is writing in WaPo and not reading The Pet Goat to school children.

With more jobs disappearing every day, the White House team is feeling the pressure. They’ve even sent Michelle “The Closer” Obama on a little federal agency schmooze tour to get this thing moving. https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18442.html. BTW: can someone make the First Lady a superhero costume?  I hear Miuccia Prada has some free time.

If all you know about the economy is that it now takes twenty minutes to get a decaf grande low-fat no-whip latte in the afternoon at your local Starbucks, then stick with me. I’ll help you navigate the murky waters of this recession.

It all started with this thing called the lending bubble. People who didn’t really have money to lend were loaning it to people who didn’t really have the money to pay it back. It seemed OK for a while because all the borrowing and lending was just theoretical numbers but as soon as someone wanted to actually see some tangible munnies it fell apart. It was a little bit like a worldwide version of Bernie Maddoff’s Ponzi scheme. People at the top were making money and the people at the bottom saw it and thought that if they got in they would make money too. Eventually so many people wanted to get in on the game that when it all crashed it took the rest of us down with it.

So what happens next? Well, because it’s funny, let’s compare the US economy to a poorly working digestive system. Right now the country has IBS and the stimulus bill is like an 820 billion dollar Fiber-One bar.

Obama wants to load up the constipated economy with lots of it-does-a-body-good kind of stuff--programs designed to get things moving again. But the Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on where the money should go. They are like different organs in the body competing for nutrients.

In the US when you hear politicians talk about pork, or pork barrel spending what they mean is federal funds directed at private companies as a way of paying back constituents for their support, it’s used interchangeably with the term earmark. Well here’s where things get complicated. Everyone knows pork is bad for the digestive system but in the case of the stimulus bill neither party can agree on what qualifies as pork.

In general the Democrats want to fix things by spending money on social programs as a way to shore up everything on a national level. For instance if we spend money creating schools more teachers will have jobs and more children will have access to education. And children who have access to all the things they need will grow up to be more productive adults and everyone will be happy, the end. It sounds perfect but some people don’t like the idea that they have to pay money in taxes to support things they don’t care about, ie: education.

Republicans on the other hand think we’ll all be better off if no one takes any money away from us in the first place. If they cut taxes so more of the money we make stays in our bank account then we will have more money to spend. And that means we will go out and buy lots of Wii games and lattes and sneakers. Theoretically this creates jobs because someone has to make all those Wii’s and sneakers right? The flaw in that plan is that the companies that make the Wii’s and whatever other crappy things sold at the mall have outsourced their production to overseas manufacturers who produce things much more cheaply. So even when we spend a lot of money on massage chairs at Brookstone it’s not helping create any jobs.

The Republicans get especially testy (haha) when they see money going to any kind of program that makes them think about SEX. The first round of the stimulus bill had some money set aside for family planning options to help low-income women get access to birth control and the GOP--the party of infantilism fetishist David Vitter, gay-denying bathroom sex cruiser, Larry Craig, and Congressional page-loving pederast Mark Foley—said, “Hells no.”

There’s a new round of plans to fix our backed up economy every day. So stay tuned and over the next few weeks I’ll break it all down for you. In the meantime until the two parties can stop bickering and pushing people around, our President is picking up some freelance at the Washington Post.