While many of our people are comfortable in regular jobs and normal economic patterns, there is growing awareness that our country is in really bad economic times.
About 10 percent of our people who really want and need jobs don’t have them. They are acutely aware of the problem. There may be 10 percent more skating on thin economic ice.
Some businesses are in trouble — big ones like General Motors and small ones that do not “make the news” but are “going under” with little notice, or fearing they may.
Many of the problems are inescapable. Some of them, however, result from bad decisions.
It is reported that in 2009, there were 1.43 million bankruptcy filings, the seventh worst year on record! How many other people and businesses came close? How many will go under in 2010?
We don’t like that kind of bad news, reflecting real hardships for too many of our friends and neighbors. And yet, too many of our national leaders are taking us into deeper economic troubles by defying basic economic rules. Our U.S. government’s big spenders insist we can’t go broke. But we are operating in deep red ink.
Individuals can’t “print money.” Government does. Many individuals can’t borrow. But Washington — meaning all of us — has borrowed $12.1 trillion! Congress is voting to spend a trillion dollars-plus more than it is taking in from too-high taxes on us, as unemployment is painful. Yet serious, factual economic warnings are laughed off by too many of the people who are in power in our federal government.
States — ranging from California to Tennessee — are feeling a painful pinch. Many businesses are hurting. Many of our people are in serious distress.
Basic laws of economics can be defied only so long, but not permanently. Yet some persist in doing wrong things that inevitably bring wrong results. Why are some surprised by the results?