Will the Politicians Listen to the People?
My wife an I went out for a Sunday stroll today in Santa Monica. On Montana Avenue, the chic shopping street, every third store is empty with a for lease sign in the window. A year ago our U.S. personal savings rate was almost zero and by next month it will be over 6%. Besides saving more we are beginning to pay down our credit cards. Earlier this year household debt as a percentage of disposable income was 134% up from 68% in the early 1980’s. My Princeton classmate Vince Farrell notes that this is a huge difference.
Disposable personal income is close enough to $11 trillion that we can use that as a number. If household debt were to retreat to, say, 100% of income, it would be a retrenchment of a good bit over $3 trillion. That would be one big bite out of consumer expenditures. I have no idea where this debt to income will or should go. Things tend to revert to the norm over time, and if we were in the 70% range in the 1980’s, I don’t think returning to 100% is a crazy view. If the savings rate were to return to its 70-year average of 9%, that would chip in almost $1 trillion a year.
Vince is saying that the consumer’s reversion to a cosmology of thrift will take $4 trillion out of annual consumption which represent 72% of our GDP. This would be a very different America and there is not a single politician, including our President who is willing to cop to this fact. Look at the capacity utilization rates in our key industries.
Issues of overcapacity have plagued the capitalist system since the 19th Century. The economist Michael Bernstein gives us some insight to the important work of the Austrian economist Josef Steindl on the causes of our Great Depression.
Reductions in capacity utilization imply not only declines in national income but also increases in unemployment. In the presence of underutilized capacity, firms will be increasingly disinclined to undertake any net investment. A cumulative process is thereby established wherein a decline in the rate of growth, by generating reductions in the rate of capacity utilization, will lead to a further decline in the rate of expansion as net investment is reduced. Individual firms, by believing that decreases in their own investment will alleviate their own burden of excess capacity, merely intensify the problem economy-wide.
It seems to me that the American public has already made a shift to a culture in which spending at the mall will be a lot less important and yet the politicians are acting like their job is to restore the status quo ante–a world the public no longer cares about. Larry Summers talks about getting the big banks lending again, but what business wants to borrow when there is so much excess capacity? There are too many damn malls. Too many car dealerships. What person in their right mind would start a new retail clothing business today?
The Big Lie of the current economic debate is that we just went through a “hundred year flood”–that this was all caused by the Sub Prime mortgage crisis. But the problems of stagnation and capacity utilization have been increasing since 1975 when overall capacity utilization was at 86%. It hasn’t been above 82% since 1995 and today it is below 77%. But the larger problem has been that we have misallocated our capital since the problems of economic stagnation first raised their head in the mid 1970’s. Steindl knew there were solutions, but he doubted we had the political will to solve them.
With the 1976 republication of his Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism, Steindl allowed that technical innovation, product development, public spending, and research and development initiatives might provide the means to escape from investment inertia. Even so, he was extremely concerned that most accumulation strategies in mature capitalist nations would focus on military-industrial activity and war itself. Using both public and private investment funds for other purposes, while obviously desirable, would be “exceedingly hard” given “the workings of political institutions.”
Reagan’s solution to stagnation was Military Keynesianism. Instead of investing in alternative energy solutions or more efficient transportation when the Arab Oil Embargo was staring us in the face, he chose to create the largest military expenditure in peace time history with borrowed money. And what do we have to show for it? Our current economic crisis.
Now there really is only one solution. We have to wean ourselves from the mall economy and begin to make things that other countries want to buy. I believe the citizens are way ahead of the politicians in this project. If Vince Farrell is right and we are in the process of moving $4 trillion in a $13 trillion GDP away from consumption, that is a 40% drop in annual consumption expenditure. Of the three buckets of the economy (consumption, investment and exports) we can already see that investment will increase by at least $1 trillion (the increased savings rate). The missing piece is exports.
There are two problems with exports. First, the stuff we make that the rest of the world wants (movies, music, video games, software, drug patents) are all subject to the crushing disdain for our intellectual property on the part of most of the world’s citizens (as well as our own public). We have built a knowledge economy, but China doesn’t give a fig for our IP regime. If the people want cheap Viagra, China will tell Pfizer to pound sand. If the Brazilians want pirate copies of Shrek, Lula could care less. Second, we are lagging behind in making the technology of the future. Why isn’t General Electric the world’s largest exporter of wind turbines? Why isn’t Babcock and Wilcox’s new preassembled nuclear reactor being exported to France and Japan? These kinds of technologies are not easily assembled by cheap labor in third world countries. Germany is the largest exporter of Solar power equipment.
It seems to me that President Obama is going to have to level with the American people pretty soon. We cannot go back to Larry Summers Status Quo Ante. Obama knows we need to make this shift and he talked about it in his campaign. But now the administration seems so concerned on putting a band aid on the banks that they are not really thinking beyond 2010. The auto business will never be the same. The malls will slowly disappear. Unless we figure out how to get paid for our knowledge economy and also start manufacturing new products that the world needs, we are going to be in a world of hurt. The summer of 2009 will be seen as the calm before the real storm.
Is the national economy a stool with three legs, or three buckets? Not sure either is a very perfect analogy, or a good analytical tool to see what might be done to keep the species, let alone the nation, alive.
As to investment, this person with virtually none, and no debt and a tiny bit of cash, would like to know what we are to invest IN? What’s left seems to be residuals of the Big Bubble. all tied to a return to consumption of something or other. Maybe not Coach bags or Rolexes, except for the exceptional few, but some THING or other tangible other. No focus on spirit or community or inter-relatedness or “ecological” understanding, just more high-flyers peddling IPOs and CDOs and all that tripe in The Next Big Boom, then taking their profits (collected in Funny Munny, converted to gold or that private island) and beating it before the next crash.
There was a ’60s theme in one corner of ecnomics, as I recall, that held that a steady asymptotic increase in power consumption was the true lodestone measure of an economy, the path to all future growth, and the sine qua non of “the good life.” Like the notion that “advanced civilzations” built Dyson Spheres to capture the entire output of their star, I guess to power their Orgasmatrons and the other consumer goods in their home entertainment centers. You gotta have something to eat the kilowatts and burn the carbon fuels and all that.
If the necessary things don’t happen soon, looks to me like we will track another “scientific” notion of the not-so-far-past, that like the sun, which was understood to work off ordinary combustion, and was going to soon burn itself out.
But hey, I’m just a pessimist. I keep coming back to The Beer Game, which every year with fresh crops of MBA wolves, demonstrates that greed and “optimism” will lead every capitalist, profit-driven, career-building system to the same bad end you highlight here — overproduction encouraged by overconsumption enabled by minting Funny Munny through the same repetitive behaviors of banks from the Fed on down the line, and government that lives off spending a little Funny Munny taxed out of healthy circulation to sort of pacify the public while stealing our patrimony to build those Really Neat War Toys.
JTMcPhee
June 21, 2009 at 6:23 pm
What do people the world over want to buy from a mature economy with a relatively large research base? Clean, cheap energy; better healthcare outcomes at low or reasonable cost; faster, safe, more pleasant means of transportation at low or reasonable cost; advances which require us to use less fuel to heat and cool our homes, water, or food; devices which make it easier for us to read books, hear music, talk to our friends far away; products and services which make for a more enjoyable and independent retirement or old age. There is a lot of useful work to be done by the well educated folks up here in the knowledge economy but what we don’t need is a big costly weapons and “financial innovation.” Bright people will not devote themselves to making solar energy cost competitive with fossil fuels when they can earn 50 times as much selling derivatives. This is the national conundrum. We are well positioned to make advances that will truly improve life in this world, but we are putting our energy into “funny money” and “really neat war toys.” That’s not economics, that’s politics and it will kill us.
Ed in SV
June 21, 2009 at 10:25 pm
It seems to me that, and this is from personal observation and not hard information, that the choice to save began during the run-up to the election. People were really thinking about the economy and very aware of the consequences with which they were now living. Gas prices fell but the number of drivers on the freeway still declined. Yes, I know more unemployed played a part in that but still it seemed to me it was like
Dad suddenly remembering it was his role to tell everyone to turn out the lights. But in this case it wasn’t just Dad. Restaurants are hurting these days because families have started eating together and at home. It is as though we suddenly decided to look at our life-style’s diet and thin out the fat.
Meanwhile, Jon’s premise that we citizens apparently want something different than what our politicians are offering feels true too. Does anyone really see any problem solving value in the chest thumping going on in the legislatures of California and New York to name just two?
Funny as it may seem, we actually might make this transition easier because most of us really knew in our hearts that this “fabulous” over-extended life we were living really just that.
It reminds of Melvin Dummar, in Howard and Melvin, when he acknowledges losing out is okay because he never really thought he was going to be rich any way. I think we have known all along that we already had enough. It’s just the greedy that are going to have a hard time of it.
rhbee
June 21, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Anecdote:
I live on a boat in a marina. My newest neighbor is a guy from LA who was really into the get-and-spend life, had many of the “required” toys. In 2006 he was a “player.” Now he’s surprised and a little dismayed that the many credit card issuers who he had paid regularly (maybe the minimum, but regular) for years have suddenly jumped his interest rate to over 20% and chopped his limit to just above what he owes. As he puts it, he got out of LA just before the banks caught up with him. He put a lot of money into shares of one of the whiz-bang “mature economy” net service producers, which are now trading, if at all, at 1% of the price he paid.
On advice from his brother, who’s a very experienced boater who moved here years ago and works in the yacht business, he’s bought a 60-odd-foot “classic plastic” motor yacht, and his slip rent and boat payments are a fraction of what he paid on his “home” in LA. He’s done a little small-boating, and is more than a little overwhelmed by the enormousness of a twin-diesel, 30-ton vessel.
But he seems also overwhelmed and completely befuddled by what’s happened to his personal and the national economies, and at a loss to see any distance into the future at all.
Hope he figures out a way to make the transition from aggressive consumer to, what would one call it, rational survivor? Stable contributor? I’ll offer such help and advice as I can, along with the other members of our little “gated community.” But we are all facing the same greyness.
All those items Ed says we knowledge workers here can sell depend on someone, somewhere, having enough Real Wealth to buy our stuff. Just wondering: Is there evidence that depleted oceans, depleted petroleum stocks, depeleted ore deposits, depleted soils, all the rest, will be able to cough up that wealth to support our national fraction of 6.8 billion people many of whom either are still draining the last blood from the carcass of the old world or are dreaming of a return to the heady days of boom-boom-boom and acting as if “the recovery” is just a quarter or a year away? I’m not sure our institutions and all the people who have been taught that they are “consumers” and not “citizens,” with rights but no responsibilities or duties, and for whom delayed gratification is a mortal sin, have it in them to get to a sustainable next stage.
JTMcPhee
June 22, 2009 at 2:56 am
Quoting JTMcPhee: “I’m not sure our institutions and all the people who have been taught that they are “consumers” and not ‘citizens…’”
Bingo! People are saving and trying to pay off debts but it’s not like there’s been some change in awareness. It’s just what’s become necessary. Meanwhile there are a few generations of kids (starting with mine, I’m 26) who have never been made to do without and expect — and this is just a small list — 24-hour restaurants and stores, a wide range of services available to take care of unpleasant chores and lots of futuristic gadgets for Father’s Day. Maybe I should also mention artificially cheap food and Dollar Stores. Adjusting to a world where these things aren’t always available will be very difficult for a large proporation of the population, who will no doubt pine for the “good ol’ days.” Jon’s been saying for a while now that Obama has to “level with the people” about this, but nobody wants to and I see no indication that he won’t wait until it’s already painfully obvious.
Obama has made small gestures, that don’t cost much politically, to placate single-issue progressives (DEA lenience on medical marijuana, equal benefits for gay federal workers) but any reform in the sickest parts of the system have been woefully half-assed and, from what I can tell, designed to satisfy Republicans/corporate America: Health care “reform” that retains insurance institutions; “ending” Iraq occupation only to do a buildup in Afghanistan instead; and, of course, everything to do with Wall St.
Daniel in Denton
June 22, 2009 at 5:10 am
1. Our money is elsewhere. If we want it back, we have to change our market focus away from selling to the US.
2. Our property is being stolen. If we are to rely on IP, we have to renegotiate the trading relationships to get back some of that stolen Viagra money.
3. We have to play by global rules. This affects US law because we don’t make the rules outside our borders. It is easy to make a “big deal” in other countries. It can be quite hard to close payments. Americans who don’t understand business outside the US borders in terms of the muscle required shouldn’t be doing it without experts and legal firepower.
No one likes it, but there is a reason the Republicans play mean and stay rich. It is tough as nails and playing kumbayah at time to ante out the payments isn’t going to get it done. There is a tough mindedness to business that has to be cultivated and practiced or lose.
We’re not evolving into kinder gentler. We will be moving toward the kind of state we see in Russia. As the options narrow and cisterns run dry, we will become meaner and rougher.
len
June 22, 2009 at 7:39 am
Len- Right on. WE need to understand that we can’t build a knowledge economy and then just give it away for free.
Jon Taplin
June 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm
No one likes it, but there is a reason the Mafia plays mean and stays rich.
Dan
June 22, 2009 at 7:59 am
We’ve actually been on a bit of a spending spree. I bought my first-ever lawn tractor recently, a concession to advancing age and the folly of pushing a lawn mower in 90 degrees. And we have a landmark anniversary this year so we’re taking a vacation that, by my standards, is expensive.
But we’re fortunate to be able to do these things without debt. If I had been forced to put these purchases on a credit card balance, they wouldn’t have happened. Our balances stay at $0. So I get it.
But I’ve been getting it for over twenty years now.
Dan
June 22, 2009 at 8:10 am
1. There’s a HUGE giant international market for US goods. They are finally living as long as we do, their becoming middle class helps us.
2. While we must worry about piracy, its better than it was, and gets better as other nations leave the third world.
3. Our immigration laws need serious reform. I can’t believe we aren’t granting green cards to anyone that can buy a home here. I can’t believe we aren’t encouraging foreign students to stay. I can’t believe we don’t have open door H-1B visa requirements.
4. US domestic energy production (oil, coal, and nuclear) needs to be given wide berth. Same goes for Canada and their shale.
5. US Tax policy is joke. End corporate taxes. Stop taxing foreign profits. Move to a consumption tax. This country needs own all the IP, and be the place all the world’s wealthy want to live.
6. Open our borders with Mexico. Insist that Americans be able to OWN land in Mexico. We need to view that country as a GIANT Florida.
——
Jon, I 110% dig the “savings” is important vibe, BUT we need ALL the malls. We need the new houses. We need to growth wealth here. We need to grow corporations here. We need to bring immigrants here. And frankly I think you have a deeper alterior motive past savings – I think you want people to ASPIRE to things you deem important – and thats not a open market. That’s not free.
Morgan Warstler
June 22, 2009 at 10:34 am
Morgan- You may be right that immigration is one of the few routes to growth, but growth at what cost?
I don’t think Piracy is getting better. We need a global ISP Copyright license. $3/month/broadband subscriber. It would bring in $20 billion today and $60 billion in a few years.
Jon Taplin
June 22, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Jon, do you really think artists are making less money today than in 2000?
“Growth at what costs?” Huh?
I’m telling ya, I don’t even understand sentences like that. Love at what costs? Life at what costs?
Whats possibly wrong with being the place where all the world’s talent all lives?
Morgan Warstler
June 23, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I just called my bookie, he says there’s a 5 / 2 line that next week’s schtick will be, “We need to SELL Canada to Israel and use the MONEY to build GIANT THUNDERDOMES.”
Dan
June 22, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Real men push their own lawn mower.
What do you don’t like Florida?
Morgan Warstler
June 22, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Morgan, if cancer cells could speak, they would talk and think like you.
rebar, you can stop reading now if you have even gotten this far.
But Morgan, I have to admit that I do really, really like that Spoonerism-neologism you coined.
“Alterior. Alterior.” I really like how it rolls around and reverberates in mouth and mind.
What a (do I have this right?) trope from that broke-down nag, “ulterior!”
Yep, not the kind of perverse subversion that “patriotic free marketeers” have ulteriorously pulled, via campaign contribution bribery, packing the judiciary and other forms of regulatory capture, changing the flows of the rivers of commerce from broad deltas feeding a rich ecosystem, to a narrow, levee’d ditch dumping into the already replete reservoirs of the Special Few.
But “ALTERIOR,” as in “CHANGE the meme, remake it into something healthy for everyone.” Wonderful word, even if it’s just another serendipitous output from the “Monkeys and Typewriters” School of Political Lunacy.
I think somebody needs to try to get a buzz going for it, not me, obviously, since I am unversed in such arcanae. As a heaven-sent foil against what’s shaking (Politician’s hands, as they work to keep a grip on the greasy palms of special interests? Their jowls, as they grab a big laugh at the stupidity and docility of the rest of us? The Money Tree, that drops its fruit in such a small circle around The Base?) in the Imperial Court and Exchequer.
Here’s a really good example of how “politicians listen to the people.” From the Huffington Post today, “Will Congress Put Useless Fighter Jets Above America? And if it takes you more than one guess to get the answer (I almost said “the correct answer,” but what’s in the wind, those F-22 “fine aircraft” from Lockheed-Martin, is not at all the “correct answer” if the goal is the survival of the species. Of course, if the goal is to strip every last penny of Real Wealth from what’s left of the actual working people who make stuff that keeps the species alive (food and such silly fripperies) and put it in the pockets of people who work from “Where’s Mine?” and “Screw You” as their anthems, then I guess a couple of billion is, as Maher or one of those guys said on behalf of the Ruling Class, just “the kind of money we wipe our asses with.”
And after all, as they all know, “Apres nous, le deluge.” And they will all be dead or gone over the horizon, with no chance for any “clawback” or retribution or imposition of consequences for what they took from, and what they did to, the rest of us.
And rebar, always remember: “Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”
JTMcPhee
June 22, 2009 at 4:34 pm
You could have added, “Apres la mort le medicin.” and been almost as accurate.
rhbee
June 22, 2009 at 5:59 pm
In regards to the 134% household debt, this is a really terrifying figure. Do you really think that people have truly changed, that it won’t go back up once the recession is over? Are the politicians right, in so much as, people won’t really be able to go to a lower rate of consumption than they’re accustomed to?
peacetown
June 22, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Jon,
Thanks for the links to Bernstein and Steindl. Fascinating stuff. Along the lines of “what can we learn from the Great Depression”, my favorite work on that subject to date is the little volume by Peter Temin from his 1989 Robbins Lectures (the same series Paul Krugman just gave) entitled Lessons from the Great Depression.
Temin’s basic thesis is that “it was the First World War, stupid!”. More specifically, he basically agrees with the theory advanced by Barry Eichengreen (see: Golden Fetters) that the attempt to reinstitute the pre-war gold standard broke the economic system. But he goes a step further to trace the cause to the political and economic dislocations generated by WWI.
For the present day, my intuition is that “it’s the globalization, stupid!” WWII destroyed all our industrial competition and we began collecting ‘rents’ (in the economists’ sense) from the wider world. This made us rich and allowed us to afford the broad-based prosperity of the mid 20th century. But globalization has gradually eroded our unfair material advantages and exposed us to a hurricane of competition from the poorer and hungrier peoples abroad. We’ve masked our wasting strength with steadily more intense doses of financial “sugar and caffeine”, but this isn’t enough.
Ed in SV: I share your feeling that we’ve got a ton of constructive things to be doing, but we’ve got to shake the addiction to sugar highs. It isn’t clear the political class has gotten this message yet. If we settle for muddling through, look for other ’scrappier’ nations to outpace us in fairly short order. It has happened repeatedly down the centuries. Nothing exempts us from the workings of economic and demographic fate.
Seth
June 23, 2009 at 12:20 am
Seth- Thanks for the pointer to Peter Temin’s work. I think you’re probably right about the globalization rents drying up.
Jon Taplin
June 23, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Will politicians listen? I’m concerned at reports that Dems may cave on health care reform and give the insurance co’s continued rights to direct our sorry health system.
Our family’s story: College is suddenly a terrible burden. One child admitted to UC, with her Cal Grant for $8K/year suddenly “up for grabs” which could put us on the loan list for another $8k for the year, in addition to the loans we and our student have already committed to. Remember when UC’s cost $8k/year altogether? Now it’s $22K including housing, with 5% fee raises in the offing for already-enrolled students!!
If we want services – and an educated workforce – we have to get FAIR TAXATION in California. Today’s system of Prop 13 (freezing corporate assessments in 1977, along w granny’s assessments), and whining (“we pay far too much taxes!”), leaves no-tax Repubs in charge of the empty purse. No tax = No services = No savings!!
Remember, California is now 50th among all states in the funding given per student for public education. From the top educational system in the nation before Prop 13, we are now dead last!!
Not a great legacy to leave our children, in exchange for saving a small amount in annual taxes.
MS
June 23, 2009 at 8:30 am
JTM, you and Jon have alterior motives. As in a deep sick hidden liberal agenda behind the positive policy changeyour are encouraging
Meaning, even when savings rates go to 10% (a good policy position), you and Jon won’t be happy if the cost of goods continues to fall 10%… and everyone continues to buy tons of disposable (read recyclable if it helps) stuff.
That’s the danger… the whole world has waited patiently and willed themselves to finally buy some disposable shit for themselves… it’ll be cheap new techie shit… the whole world needs connected to all the TV, music etc in the cloud. They all want a house full of IKEA furniture. They all want to eat Cheetos out a bag they buy from the store. I’ll say it again, disposable isn’t a bad thing.
4B have-nots finally getting to live the their dream don’t need a bunch of old bitter white dudes telling them that won’t find happiness in their new cell phones, Levi’s, Nike shox, and Lady Gaga (who personally makes me vomit).
And OUR FUTURE economy is based on facilitating this dream.
So savings yes. Sour-puss alterior motives, no.
Morgan Warstler
June 23, 2009 at 10:12 am
Morgan- I’m well aware that more than half the world wants to get into at least “second world” status. I’m just not sure its going to be American goods they are buying when the get there.
Jon Taplin
June 23, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Jon I don’t want them to buy “American goods.” I don’t care if all the goods are manufactured in China. Heavy stuff, make it here, light stuff make it there – transportation costs are going up.
What I’m after is that ALL the goods be designed by Americans OR by people who thankfully have come to American universities to study or American headquarters to work, and have thankfully stayed to live here and spend their lives and their own dollars in America… buying a house here, getting their hair cut here, buying clothes at the mall, investing in more American grown design… and the shit that screw this future up is what policies we need to fix.
I personally think we agree on this… my point is that ALL of our policies (see post above) should be pointed to that goal. We want to be the most economically fun place to live, with the most economic freedom to enjoy… we are wooing the future management teams of global companies. If we make it hard to come here, stay here, or economically painful for them to stay – that’s the horrible danger.
Morgan Warstler
June 23, 2009 at 4:17 pm
The only one working from a sour-puss agenda and still trying to figure out how a non-word can carry meaning contrary its roots is you, Morgan.
I know you want attention but flailing about like the discussion is a pinata is probably not the way to get it.
rhbee
June 23, 2009 at 11:11 am
MS — seen the bumper sticker on the back of the Class A “motorhome” that reads, “We’re SPENDING our children’s inheritance!” One I saw even had a rough Magic Marker sketch of a closed hand with a raised middle finger.
Are people starting to see what the “meme” has really been all these post-Eisenhower years, and maybe before for all I can tell? There’s a phenomenon some have called “compression,” where change and decay happen ever more quickly. Ignorance and greed feed the appetites of the few who see the somewhat hidden handles that let them grab and manipulate the rest of the population into “buying into” a set of behaviors that tickle the pleasure centers but dead-end the species. “Buying into” in quotes, because the statement that “I just bought a 96 inch class flat screen and a Beemer crossover and a 20,000 sq. ft house” really mean that “I have the right to exclusive use of those items as long as I can make the payments on the loans payable to the people who hold the actual title.” With the knowledge that turning raw materials into all this stuff involves an incremental shitting in the nest that all of us have to live in, with the personal lifetime quantum of increased shittiness being small enough that no negative incentive to do different comes into play.
The whole bubble-bailout thing is a black-hole-gravitational collapse, a compression and acceleration of the robbing of the future to feed the obscenely tumescent appetites of the present, that lie in that oh-so-special singularity at the very center of the black hole. Just like what is the most likely outcome of the “health care debate.” And the whole military-budget thing.
Legacy for our children? Even folks who “provide for” their kids, buying an education at Stanford or Brown, drive them to school in the Family Truckster, support their and their offspring’s appetites for MORE of everything, dumping more shit into the nest until finally the Next Generation is displaced and drowned by our own crap.
But like you say, the Grover Norquists of the world are happy with their “tax savings” and the return on investment they make on their sotck in the economy of “compression,”so, as the young people, a majority of who seem to be invested in the same compressing meme might say, WTFC?
JTMcPhee
June 23, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I like your article; however, I’d like to hear some of your ideas on how to fix the problem.
Patriot
November 30, 2009 at 11:29 pm