Making Sense out of the Economy
I heard a news reporter on News Radio 780 (AM) WBBM in Chicago discuss the economy in a business report that things have not been looking very good in general for the economy. The reporter mentioned something that stuck in my head; he said (with a dismal tone to his voice) that “Right now, unemployment... could only go up.”
And it was said in a way that made it seem like this was a dismal thing, but all I could think was that those statistics mean that unemployment is at an all-time low. And I mentioned this, and realized that this is one way a news reporter can editorialize the news, suddenly making news reports commentaries.
And I didn’t realize that reporters could make commentaries like that about the economy, but then it occurred to me that news reporters have been putting their collective slant on any war activity in Iraq, so if every news center (newspapers, radio and television) outlet in the country can help to change America’s view of combat in Iraq (expect of course for anything related to Fox News and the Republican pundits of Talk Radio), then they could probably work to put a slant on how the nation views the economy. Think about it: out liberal media on the whole talks about the doom and gloom of the war, as well as the economy – only the Republican stations work to show off how necessary the Iraq war is (if only Congress wouldn’t have been such sissies and only declared the war legally themselves instead of just letting Bush do whatever he wanted), and only the more Republican-oriented news broadcasters talk about how successful the economy is. I mean really, the stock market has been at an all-time high, much higher than it was during Bill Clinton’s dot com successes.
But when I think about it personally, I wonder whether it is success or not. I had a lot of money saved, including a decent amount of money in my 401(K), but right at the end of Clinton’s reign (and right at the beginning of Bush’s reign), the market totally died, and I lost the vast majority of my 401(K) and a chunk of my savings. (I know, I could have moved my money into a less risky investment, good point, but that also happened to be when I was almost killed in a car accident, and I was spending my time learning how to walk and talk and eat instead of how to reinvest my savings. Sorry.)
So I go into this thinking that since the high days of the 90s, I lost a lot of money due to the stock market. And I look at the high value of the stock market now, and I compare the value of the dollar to the Euro, and see how in world markets we’re getting destroyed, and our dollar seems to be worth less and less. When I say that, I’m reminded that the Euro didn’t exist in the 90s, and a reason for the increasing value of the Euro is th expansion of the Euro into different countries. So I guess that’s supposed to make me think that it’s all in my head, that the dollar is still extremely valuable and we’re really just basking in America’s bounty of wealth.
Hmm.
I just keep thinking that we Americans are acting like that overweight uncle who drives in for Thanksgiving dinner, eating a lot and then watching the football game while drinking beer, reveling in the days when he used to be a quarterback for the high school football team. It’s almost as if he should be telling every family member (again) about how he threw four touchdown passes at the homecoming game and won the day. But if that fat uncle is sitting back and burping with their beer while they let someone else do all the work for them and America’s that fat uncle, this economic superpower has stopped working on excelling in the fields that will keep them ahead of the game, and outsourcing anything and everything to other countries, so they can take all of our good standing.
America has been training everyone else from other countries (with our outstanding higher educational system) to beat us at our own game. While we sit back and let them.
Maybe in the 90s mentality of trying to get rich quick, we decided to buy our Japanese technology and drive our German cars, and don’t forget that we drink our French water (yeah, I won’t forget that Evian is “naive” backwards) when we’re not drinking our French wine. But maybe when we got into the mentality that we could get rich quick instead of learning how to work hard, and when that didn’t work we’d watch the advertisements saying we could have yet another credit card so we can afford the better things in life immediately (and they forget that they’ll only put themselves farther in the hole when they can’t afford to pay the balance in full every month), maybe this country forgot as a whole how to stay ahead.
Or more importantly, possibly get ahead, since we may have lost our high ranking on this planet.
But even thinking of the housing boom that happened in the first half of this decade, people (because mortgage rates were so low) were buying bigger and better houses like mad. But a lot of people bought homes not with fixed 30 year loans, but with variable interest loans, and a lot of people are having problems with paying their mortgages with the higher rates they now have to deal with (for that matter, when people thought it was good to get a house, they got something bigger and much more expensive than their budget could even afford, and they’re paying the price now too with foreclosures). And I just read in USA Today (weekend paper, Friday-Sunday, August 31st to September 3rd 2007) the headline “FHA to step in, help refi at-risk loans” (with the subhead “Bush proposal would benefit 80,000,” I love seeing these affirmations that people want a socialist government that bail them out of every problem they have) because some homeowners with subprime adjustable rate mortgages will be saved by big brother, I mean, our government, by being given the ability to refinance their homes.
And with people having problems with their mortgages, mortgage brokers are having problems too – because several thousand of the nation’s 53,000 brokerages closed in 2007 because of this year’s housing slump and the recent surge in home loan defaults. And because in the past loaners did not pay so much attention to credit scores, people could get away with whatever loan they chose get – even if they couldn’t afford it later. Because when you could add the past good mortgage rates with the fact that brokers can earn higher commissions by steering future home owners to loans with higher interest rates, then there is a bigger chance for people deciding on things they can’t afford.
Because if you can’t get rich that quickly, you could at least feel like you’re rich by overstepping your bounds with an unrealistic mortgage so you can have a nice big house, and by using the high interest rate credit cards to get everything you want, right?
As a nation, we’re fatter than a lot of other countries, and with out get rich quick mentality, we don’t think twice about suing a doctor for anything going wrong, which just drives the cost of the best healthcare on the planet up for everyone because of the insurance doctors have to pay to save them from their litigious patients. But you see, we all deserve the best, because we’re Americans damnit, our poor welfare constituency still has a television in their homes (the average number of televisions per household in the United States is over two TVs), our teen children feel they deserve a free cell phone. And the same youth, with dyed hair and tattoos and a pierced tongue, complain that something is wrong with the system when they’re not offered a job.
Hell, our president even offered the idea (when having to worry about border security after terrorist attacks) of granting immunity to some illegal aliens, because they do the work that he believes most Americans wouldn’t do.
Welcome to the American mentality.
But then again, our unemployment rate is so low (oh wait, the news reporter said begrudgingly that the unemployment rate “could only go up”). But then again, maybe there is a low unemployment rate not because there are more manufacturing jobs available (you know, the jobs that make better products so we don’t purchase French water and German cars and Japanese electronics and toys made in China and clothing probably manufactured in Indonesia or Thailand), but because the jobs that are available are in the service industries... I mean, think about it: if we American want the better things in life, someone needs to be pampering us in the spa, and we need more people in the wait-staff of the restaurants we prefer, we need to pay money for a car wash to try to get lower gas prices at the pump (that is the current scam at gas stations now, spend a lot more on a car wash to get less money off on your gasoline, since gas prices are now so high). And that is the thing, we Americans are filled with the mentality that we deserve the finer things in life, so we over-mortgage ourselves for a big home and we get another credit card to max out and pay the minimum charge on so we get further in debt, and we spend money we don’t have to get a nice hair cut and get our nails done – there are places that will style your hair or give you a makeover (I have to admit, I did that once for my wedding), but people want to splurge and have other people do their work for them. So yes, there is an increase of jobs, but they’re not high-paying jobs that help our economy, they are low-end jobs to help us pamper ourselves.
Is this how we get ahead?
So I see things and I wonder if we are getting ahead or falling behind. I wonder if the media is painting a dour picture, or if the stats I see about the (in general) increased stock market value are actually a good sign for our economy?
The bottom line is this in practical terms: do I feel like things have gotten more expensive than what inflation allows for? Well, I can only guess on a few comparisons, and I think big ticket items like cars have gone up (though they offer more features now), but airfares have actually gone down (I flew across the country throughout the 90s, and a round trip flight from Chicago to either Florida or Arizona at comparable times costs the same as it did in 1990). Basic food items have shot up in price (can you remember the cost of milk and eggs from 10 to 20 years ago? The price has skyrocketed.), And thanks to the smart moves from our current president, the price of gasoline has more than doubled. I mean, I traveled around the country by car in 1997, and the price I would get for a gallon of gasoline was around $1.50, and I remember the price of a gallon of gasoline in 2002 was even still sitting around the same price.
So I can’t tell you for sure if we’re better off economically than we were in 1990, or if any changes in our economy are a result of political changes (doesn’t it suck how all of these things could actually depend on each other so directly). And I can’t tell you with a 100% certainty if the value of our dollar against the Euro doesn’t say something about the value of our money – and the value of our economy. I know we’re in a global economy, but we’re outsourcing everything that we used to strive at, the Chinese purchase our used scrap metal that we think is too difficult to reshape and reuse, and China’s building skyscrapers off our scrap metals (granted, their building methods are sub-par, but still, look at what we’re giving away because we think we’re too good). And it’s a shame that I can’t even depend on the true news reporting any longer, because apparently with competition in the news world (where you’ll get your news from whomever appeals most to you emotionally), the news media is becoming less and less like reporting, and more and more like telling you the news – how you’d like to hear it.
Copyright © 2007 Janet Kuypers.
U.S. Government Copyright © 2004
Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers
on all art and all writings on this site completed
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