Over the past three decades, worker productivity in the United States has increased by a whopping seventy-six per cent. But during the same period, real hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have increased by less than two per cent.
Meanwhile, we have a housing crisis, aggravated by a sluggish economy and the fact that a growing number of Americans can't qualify for a mortgage.
The diminishing number of real estate agents have turned to looking for those remaining folks who can afford to buy. The problem is, there just aren't enough of them to go around. In a market where you see seven or nine or eleven months (or more) worth of inventory on the market and sluggish sales, there almost seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Add to the mix the complicated problem of rising gasoline prices, rising electricity, heating and cooling costs, and rising transportation costs for everything we consume, including the food we eat and the clothes we wear.
What will happen if $7 a gallon or $8 a gallon gas causes workers to say "I can't afford to commute to work anymore"? Do we pay them to drive to and from work? What happens to the economy when some in the labor force just can't make it on what they earn?
We gave big tax breaks to large corporations and individual earners in the last decade, under the assumption that those grateful beneficiaries would turn around and reinvest the money in our economy. Instead, much of the money went overseas to build plants and factories and to hire foreign labor.
What's the answer? Do we shove some more money at the top five per cent of earners, again hoping somehow that it will come back to us?
If you keep throwing a boomerang and it won't come back to you, do you keep throwing it?
Or do you buy a new boomerang?
;)
;)
Eric,
Socialism is not the answer, no matter how enticing it may look. However, look at American cities. It is a pehomenal sprawl fo miles and miles and miles.
Just change that and create a pedestrian friendly cities, that are compact, leaving open spaces (they would be environmentally greener, by the way), and you would not have to have that crazy need to drive to buy a loaf of bread.
The wasteful economies of the end of the 20th centuries have to go. They are all over and all around us.
We will have to think hard about the way we live, not try to keep the way we lived until now. When you have to drive 20 miles to work one way, and 10 miles to the closest store, nothing is going to change.
As for the bumerang, just stick it into the garbage can. We need to look for something different. Because if we keep to use it, it would come back and kill us.