Turn Out The Lights
We should never be too hasty to turn out the lights. There is always the hope that our narrative can continue, and that this is not the last act, but is only an interlude in a much longer, and better, play.
Then again, I am tempted to call for the curtain to drop on this particular play. It is a tragedy. It should end. It needs to end. For all our sakes.
Depending on who you consult, America has hit a small bump on its way towards glory; or it has fallen into the clutches of stagnation. As you know, I tend towards the latter camp.
The key for us all, as we listen to the pseudo-debate now being conducted in Washington, is that our malaise is not some giant trick played by the gods of economics. It is the result of a series of deliberate and calculated policy moves. It is the direct result of actions taken by our leadership over the past three decades as they fought to prolong the illusion of wealth accumulation. It was an illusion because underneath the glitter of the surface the foundation was being allowed to rot. Morning in America was a fiction: a false dawn elongated by an series of ever more risky tricks and sleights of hand designed to avoid confrontation with the decay that needed attention. And hard choices. No one wanted to talk about hard choices. So the illusion was burnished before us.
The glitter was the apparent increase in household wealth caused by a series of asset bubbles. Nice if you own assets. Not so nice if you finance that ownership with debt. It was an age of equity. A return to rentier lifestyles for a privileged few. Certainly not nice if you can only maintain the veneer of improvement by working longer hours in an ever less secure job, with stagnating wages and hence rising debt.
I get criticized for arguing that we are headed into a lost decade. But I am being generous. We have already endured three or four lost years in this crisis. And there is ample evidence to support the notion that we have already lost an entire generation. Think about wages. Average wages, adjusted for inflation, for an American male worker are no better than in 1975. That’s full generation inured to rotten wage growth. The mythic American Dream is long lost in the mists of the Reagan illusion. We have subsequently sunk down the world league tables in a whole pile of lifestyle categories: education, health care, longevity, incomes, and so on. But not indebtedness. In that we excel.
We borrowed to keep the dream alive. Boy did we borrow.
One consequence of this binge of borrowing was that when we were hit by the inevitable implosion, or self-destruction, of our unsafe banking system, we were already deeply indebted. Instead of having a solid balance sheet we were knee deep in debt at the very moment we needed to borrow some more. The blame for this lies squarely on the shoulders of both Reagan and Bush. They sold us a bill of goods. They built our economy on the shifting sands of finance. They pursued reckless fiscal policies with a vengeance unmatched in our history. Instead of being conservative, they were revolutionary. How ironic: they told us they were conservative, as they followed a massively radical approach.
And now their heirs are using that indebtedness to enforce a political revolution on us. They want to defund our meager safety nets in the name of fiscal rectitude. The shameless and cynical nature of their policy is breathtaking. The lie so blatant that it is hard to believe. As the cliche goes: it is easy to hide something in plain sight.
They lost the last generation in their pursuit of their pernicious anti-social individualist mania. Now they want to consign the next to a worse fate: they want to double down on the destruction of our democracy by destroying the last defense of the middle class. They want to re-establish the deeply divided pre-Depression economy with its gilded opportunities for the few, and a degrading drudgery for the many. They want to make this malaise permanent. Lest you suspect my hyperbole: watch the burgeoning class who are now employed by the lucky few to tend their lawns, mind their children, do their laundry, and clean their home[s]. In another age these were servants. Today they are simply low wage workers.
Workers with little hope of economic improvement.
Meanwhile, as a result of the opening up of our economy in the name of free market magic, and the economic collapse it brought about, we now have an enormous burden of underemployed people. These are our fellow citizens. They are without help and without hope. And our leaders try to ignore them.
Instead they engage in a furious re-writing of history to avoid responsibility for the play being staged.
Not content with dismantling our sense of community, they want to prevent any chance it will be recaptured. They want to expunge from history any remains of the response to the Great Depression. Indeed, they seem intent on reigniting depression in order to scorch the earth clean of vestiges of social action.
Their policy prescriptions relentlessly undermine the opportunity of the many and privilege the few. Whether it is fighting inflation, cutting government spending, deregulating banks and business, imposing austerity, or reducing taxes, the end is the same. The few gain. The many lose.
We have watched this play out long enough.
We have lost three decades of income growth.
It is time to change the story line.
It is time to turn out the lights on their free market magic along with the inequality it engenders.
Turn those lights back on for the rest of America. Now that’s a play worth staging.
