Enjoy today, because tomorrow will be worse.
America’s gross domestic product is failing to sustain full employment. GDP is also failing to support the size of the US government and the nation’s obligations as expressed as debt and deficit and percentage of GDP. America is tanking.
When government is unable to meet the basic needs of its population, that is cause for great alarm. When people are dissatisfied to a high degree, eventually they reach the point of revolt and demanding something different.
Today, government leaders can respond by addressing the demand for a sustainable economy that satisfies a list of expected outcomes. Government is the host for economic systems that produces sufficient economy to satisfy citizens’ needs.
If President Obama says in the State of the Union speech this week that our future is dire, and that poor and needy people will feel greater deprivation and hardship, then that is simply unacceptable. If Republican congressman tell Americans on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that their earned benefits will be diminished, that is unacceptable. If government tells the Middle Class that there are insufficient jobs and insufficient upward mobility for them, that is unacceptable.
We have heard indications that all of these deficiencies are possible and therefore government is failing.
What Americans need to hear from the President and Congressional leadership are solutions, not alarms as we can hear the alarms ourselves. Their behavior is alarming.
The circumstance has been coming for a long time as the alarms have been ringing loudly too. For instance, consider this article from 2011.
“How the U.S. Economy Has Been Tanking for 60 Years
January 21, 2011
To properly look at GDP in terms of actual economic progress, one must back out all the borrowing that takes place during the same period. That is, the proper way to look at GDP is to subtract back out that which is paid for not with today's output, but with tomorrow's promises. The reason for this is clear: You may in fact only spend a dollar once. When looked at this way, one gets a very different view of growth in the economy, and the depth of the hole we have dug for ourselves becomes clear.
(See the photo)
There has been no actual positive GDP growth during the entire period from 1953 onward, until the fourth quarter of 2009, and since 1980 the true GDP numbers, when one looks at output (not what one pulls forward via debt), have been hideously bad. The spike upward in actual debt-adjusted growth that began in the Q4 2009 and peaked in 1Q 2010 was due to total systemic debt reduction ... the very thing the government is trying to prevent, but which is necessary to bring the economy back into balance.
This, incidentally, is why median incomes havent moved upward at all in the last decade and why it seems to be harder and harder every year to maintain a middle-class lifestyle -- and has been since the 1950s. The loss of purchasing power in real terms; the drive to two-income households; and the wild screams from the media, government, and lastly Bernanke -- with his recent assertion that QE2 has been a success because the stock market has gone up -- all underscore the fact that we have not grown the economy at all during the last 60 years. Instead we serially pulled out the credit card and said "Charge It!", continually rolling over the debt and adding more to it.”
http://seekingalpha.com/article/247844-how-the-u-s-economy-has-been-tanking-for-60-years
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