Curmudgeon's Corner

Hard to Imagine

Posted by Al Campbell on Sept. 2, 2011

U.S., Quality of Life, Political, Economy, Employment, Taxes

It is hard to imagine, but we have just posted a “net no new jobs” month for the first time since I was three years old.  And, that was 66 years ago.

Think of everything this country has been through in your lifetime or in the past sixty six years, whichever is the shorter period.  We have been through a lot in that span of time, and yet we have never “not” added new jobs in any one month.  The sheer magnitude of that accomplishment, or lack of accomplishment, is astounding.

We have had all kinds of presidents and all kinds of congresses in the course of those many years.  We have had all kinds of calamities during the course of those many years.  What could possibly explain this having just occurred?

Is it simply that President Obama has not determined how to help rather than hurt our economy?  That certainly has to be part of the answer.

Is it simply that Congress is bordering on being completely dysfunctional?  That certainly has to be part of the answer.

Is it the nature of the world’s economic decline in general?  That certainly has to be part of the answer.

I suspect that the answer goes much deeper than any or all of these reasons.  I suspect that we are seeing the culmination, the sum total, of all the laws and regulations and frittering away of our national treasure on foolish programs and even more foolish actions, the fact that we make it very difficult for business to expand, and the fact that more people are taking taxes than are paying taxes.

We seem to have had the operating theory that no matter what we did or didn’t do, we would be just fine.  Our economic engine was just too great to ever permit something like a net no new jobs month to ever occur.

We have, for whatever accumulation of reasons, just proved that we are not invincible, that we are fully capable of destroying our country’s economy and of creating no new jobs, and, ultimately, of ending the golden years of this country.

Frankly, I do believe that we are over-taxed, over-regulated and that we over-spend.  I believe that we have gradually lost whatever sense we might have had that kept us protected from ourselves until now.  The confluence of events has combined to give us a very clear and very stark look at what might be our future if we do not stop the folly that has overtaken our government, the government that you and I elect and empower.

We are moving quickly to overtake Europe at its own game.  We are moving to become an even worse example than is Greece to show what a country can do to itself.

Whose fault is this mess?

It is our fault; it is my fault and your fault for permitting this to happen.  We have sold our children and grandchildren down the river.  We are not protected from the laws of economics.  We will fail as a country if we persist in spending more than we create.  We have permitted ourselves to be lulled into the false sense of security that our enemies have long hoped we would permit.  We have very real enemies.  We are only as safe as we are powerful economically and, yes, militarily, and we weaken our country’s ability to defend us from our enemies when we permit ourselves to become overly indebted to those enemies.

We are not universally loved throughout the world.  To the contrary, we are hated by many throughout the world.  They may take our money and let us send our troops to be killed defending the interests of their countries, but they do not like us.  Look at Pakistan and Afghanistan and China and Russia and North Korea and Syria and Iraq and Iran.

Maybe this ‘achievement’ of no new jobs in a month can serve us well if we will heed its warning.  Maybe we needed to get to this point in order to understand how vulnerable we have made ourselves.  We need to get off the sidelines and get involved or nothing will happen to change our country’s direction.

You and I must get the message quickly.  We must let the political class know that we have gotten the message and that we expect them to do what is necessary to help us solve our problems.  That means that we cannot spend what we don’t have.  That means that we must reverse the decades-long movement toward a non-working class that now represents about half our population.  Europe has been on that path for years and we can plainly see that it doesn’t work.  Why can we not see that it won’t work for us anymore than it is working for Europe?