Vice President-Elect Joe Biden said the U.S. economy is in danger of ''absolutely tanking'' and will need a second stimulus package in the $600-billion to $700-billion range. The economy is in much worse shape than we thought it was in,'' Biden told me during an exclusive interview -- his first since becoming vice president-elect-- to air this Sunday on ''This Week with George Stephanopoulos.'' Joe's quite correct. We've spent the past 30 or 40 years casually discarding our manufacturing base and making our living selling information, derivitives, and burgers to each other. The Democrats' world of cloth-capped workers taking their lunch buckets to the factory every day is a fantasy. Today's Americans are supervisors and managers and executives, just like the Soddies. We hire Mexicans and Guatamalans and Peruvians to do the actual manual labor, just like the Soddies use and discard Banglas and Filipinos.
Now that the entire economy's been thoroughly gutted it could very well just tank in the Crash of 2008. The price of your house could drop to maybe $5-10,0000, max. (Don't laugh: My Mom sold her house -- both halves of a duplex and four lots for $10,000 in 1971, which for some of us isn't that long ago.)
We now live in a global economy, which is something al-Qaeda either doesn't realize or doesn't care about and the oil ticks certainly don't comprehend. The economic hipbone is connected to the economic neckbone. When our economy goes down it's going to take all the other economies in the world with it, with the possible exception of China, where they still make things, and South Korea, if they're not too leveraged. Hard skills will have some value, Modern Dance or Womyn's Studies majors need not apply.
I'm probably a dullard, but I really can't comprehend how spending unimaginably large amounts of money we don't have -- somebody said the stimulus packages add up to $21,000 per man, woman, and child in the United States -- is going to repair the damage, especially when it's been going to bonuses for Malefactors of Great Wealth and creating "green" jobs -- at the supervisory level, without a doubt -- for friends of Dems. I keep waiting to hear a politician form either party utter the Magick Words: "We can't afford it." So far there's been, if not silence, then background noise. The current path has been a thoroughly Zim approach, and it probably has cholera epidemics in its wake.
I write code for a living, one of those jobs that has been exported overseas. You can hire a coder in Bangalore for $10 an hour with no more effort than a Google search. My job isn't going to come back any more than unionized steelworkers' jobs are coming back, though good luck with getting your requirements defined and understood and getting the code maintained.
I restore furniture as a hobby, in the hours and hours of spare time I have on my hands. The output goes to my wife's antique stores -- she has space in two shops. Without much effort at all we'll be able to go into the used furniture business when the true extent of the carnage becomes fully apparent. Those among us who still have houses are going to need someplace to sit.