Some folks are saying there are signs that things are beginning to look up.
That's just what folks want us to think so we won't panic. Think of it like a man with terminal cancer being told that he's got 6 months to live instead of the 3 weeks he really has, just because the doctor doesn't want to freak him out.
So are things getting better? Make no mistake, they are not.
I'm not even looking that closely to what is actually going on and I'm seeing signs of further drops in our economy. In fact, mere days after writing my post about California functioning as a canary in the world's economic mine shaft I came across an editorial at WSJ.com entitled "The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think by Mort Zuckerman that says, in part, the following:
The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.
That's the funny thing about unemployment numbers. They only reflect claims on unemployment benefits. Pretending these numbers actually represent the accurate number of unemployed suggests that our system is perfect at employing almost all of us.
Well, it's not.
A good number of people who get on benefits run out of them before they find jobs and many folks who lose their jobs aren't eligible for unemployment in the first place. What does this mean? Just Google for "tent cities" and see what you find.
Just last week, there was a police crackdown on a tent city in Harlem just minutes from where I am typing this.
Just this past Saturday, NYC hiked up it's sales tax from 8.5% to 8.875%. You can imagine how that will help all those homeless people that were kicked out of their tent city the other day. Of course, it could be worse--they could be homeless in Los Angeles, my former home-city, where sales tax is now 9.75%. In fact, most of California's sales tax either matches or beats NYC's. Remember how I called California the canary in the economic mine shaft?
Yeah.
You may be starting to understand why I've been doing so much work with my puppet friend, Jay ThePal, lately.
The reality of the American economy is not a pleasant thing to face.
Since absolutely no one is talking about any drastic solutions to help the poor (which, let's face it, is most of the US) I think it's all too safe to assume this descent will continue, dragging what is left of the middle class with it.
I understand that higher taxes are needed to help pay for programs and new jobs and so on, but without any new value-creation, here in the US, we're just hamsters on a wheel. Thanks to endless inflation, outsourcing and corporate profit-taking, the US is probably at it's most valueless.
I won't even bring up how our money is losing value by the second and how the Earth is running out of cheap oil almost as quickly...
Orignal From: Things are even worse than the Wallstreet Journal Says...
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