Crud. I just wrote a long post and the internet ate it when my wifi gave out. I'll try to give the essence of it though, but I have to get on the road for the day soon.
-Bottom line is I DID post about the latter-day economic disruptions. They got better when we did something to prevent them and got worse when we started to peel back those measures. And many of the ones you posted were irrelevant to the average American, or relatively mild compared to the busts we used to have prior to the '30s, which would regularly leave large swathes of the population in economic ruin. We don't see those much anymore, other than 2008-2009. And that was caused by a very different kind of debt than the one you're talking about.
-Not all debt is equal. The kind of debt that wrecked the economy was overleveraging of commodities. Most of the debt that the government has accumulated in the last few years was the effect of, not the cause of the crash. Also, $16 trillion in debt isn't that much for a country that is as rich as we are, a country that has its own currency which is used as the currency for much of the world, and, as a last resort, a massive military (which I don't believe should be used to "defend our economic interests", but most of those on the right seem to think otherwise). $72 trillion in real estate commoditization, just one industry with no military and not much behind it, was a much bigger deal if you're talking leverage.
-Krugman's no dummy. He basically called the crash. I saw it coming too, divesting myself of real estate and mostly staying out of the market in the mid-2000s. It didn't feel right. Greenspan willfully ignored the possibility of a crash happening. The Fed's been a bit better under his successors.
-The Dems have been kind of problematic on helping people economically. NAFTA, TPP, CFTC, and the like have all been bad moves. But that's nothing compared to the Republicans, who appear to believe that economics is just one giant extraction industry.
As far as education goes, the average American is much more educated than in the boom and bust days of a century ago. And I don't know how much education you have, but you're just plain wrong on this, so I don't know what good your education is doing you.
-Z |
