[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
I would put it a little differently. Rather than “will ever recover from this recession,” to “will ever recover from the overall economic problems.”
All it takes to recover from recession is some quarters of positive growth in GDP, however small.
However, there are other more serious problems. If they had to be summarized in two words, I would pick “unfunded liabilities.”
This didn’t all develop under Bush: nothing like. Now, of course, as President he should have spoken more forcefully about it and worked harder to correct it. Of course it’s easier to speak in retrospect, but he should have devoted say 1/3 of each State of the Union speech to it. He did try to reform Social Security and invested considerable political capital towards that after his election to his second term, but found only opposition and got nowhere. He also should have been much more forceful on the banking problems, rather than raising some objection but getting, again, nowhere due to political opposition that looooooved what was going on. Bush failed to correct the problems, and failed to sound the alarm, rather than being as many claim the cause of the problems.
Rather, it’s been in the making for many decades. Companies, instead of using money earned this year to entirely pay for all obligations for an employees work done that year, bet that future income could largely be used instead to pay for retirement and health-care obligations incurred due to this year’s work.
Unions and individual employees bet that they would rather be paid more this year and accept such a plan for retirement and future health care, rather than saying no and saying What will you pay if instead full payment is made into insurance and retirement plans, or Just pay a salary and we will finance our own retirement and health care, how much more can the salary be then than when you have to pay for these things?
Then there is Social Security and Medicare, of course.
There is simply no way that these obligations can be met. They are far too huge. People have “paper wealth” of supposed retirement money coming in and supposed future health care benefits that simply does not exist and which the next generation isn’t going to be able to produce for them – the Ponzi scheme is nearing its end.
This is what cannot (as personal opinion) be escaped from. People are not going to get what they were promised.
We will see more of where those with the political connections will continue getting it even after the money just isn’t there – UAW for example – but overall, plans based on future income paying for obligations due from past work, or past payment into Ponzi schemes, are not going to be able to pay out anything like in full.
And even moreso when having a political party in power that is expanding the deficits far beyond even what they were before, now to a planned ongoing trillion-dollar-per year rate for the next 10 years. (Or actually they figure 9 trillion over 10 years, but that was figured without Obamacare.)
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In the end it’s all because everyone only cares about THEMSELVES.