Monday, September 29, 2008

Depression Time?



Both the far left and the far right seem to be ready to let the house burn and "blame Bush". I guess that is an option, but once it is burned, we just have a burned house, some number of bodies, and then what? Certainly the Democrats managed to make Hoover into a goat and FDR into a saint, but in real historical terms, what did that net us? Rather than a couple years of downturn, FDR managed to give us a decade, and without WWII it is hard to tell how much longer it would have gone.



So let's assume for the moment that our leadership continues to fiddle while Rome burns, BO gets elected, and we have a good rip-snorting deep recession or depression that gets blamed on Bush. Who gets hurt? I'm sure in absolute dollar losses, the rich get hurt the "worst", but that is sort of like in a famine, the big fat guy loses 50% of his body weight and feels better, while the skinny guy loses 30% and dies.



The far left and the far right are both mad as hell, and in general, they have both decided to direct their anger at Bush. It appears that they are angry enough to see their own 401K accounts drop a ton, lose their jobs and who knows what else. I lived through the '70s, and heard enough about the 30's to be sick of it forever, but it looks to me like there are a whole lot of folks that don't understand the risk being taken. I suspect that a lot of the oldsters think that Social Security will carry them through to the grave in fine form, so maybe it is good to let the young folks suffer a bit -- give them some "character". I also think that a lot of folks believe that they "can't be hurt much" or "the rich guys will get hurt more". The media helps them think that, but it is unfortunately wrong. The price of sheephood is often too high.

No comments:

Post a Comment