“Stuff’s Getting Better...”

- attributed to President Richard Starkey (from the film, The Postman)

Editors/Staff

http://TheIndependentDaily.com

Notwithstanding what you may “think” about the situation today, things seems to be moving along fairly well as we trudge relentlessly toward some kind of recovery: Not returning to what we were in April 2007, but toward something new. What existed before, just prior to the collapse, is plainly not re-attainable.

We will never see a return to Manufacturing employment to any level near what once was without being embroiled in conflict with China: That’s the only way to shut off the endless flow of junk Americans like to buy at their favorite Welfare Retailers - Walmart, Dollar General, and so on. Read article...

Until then we are a nation built on Service employment counting on Healthcare, primarily, to add to longer term growth, which is why we need Old People to fuel that furnace of opportunity. That’s why our government doesn’t want you to do those things that shorten your life: They’re counting on your flaccid, tired, demented body to find its way into the machinery of Care in order to provide jobs for Americans. That’s why President Obama pushed so relentlessly for the Affordable Care Act - to add more fodder to the canon. It is the fundamental growth factor of our GDP.

So, as we’ve written many times before in The Independent Daily, we can never see a return to an economic base that will support the type of real growth of the past. For tomorrow, growth will be primarily in Services where wages are at best capable of sustaining a very modest lifestyle without the opportunity for expansive luxury.

The Rich will continue to get richer, but the poor will not get poorer: Their numbers will remain painfully high requiring government assistance and oversight - another job growth opportunity.

Thus Housing cannot return to any level near that experienced before. We’ll not again see Housing as an investment adding to the wealth of the average American except in those few wealthy ghettos surrounding hubs of overpaid Technology and Investment employment. The Average American will instead revert to the way America was when, as an example, I was young: A house then was not an investment tool: It was where you lived. In the 1950s my father bought a house for us to live in. A few years after, if we elected to move, it was worth at least the original purchase price and typically not a lot more. That was the Up Side. That was the expectation.

That is the way we must learn to view the America of tomorrow.

What’s interesting is that regardless of who led our country - Bush or Obama - and who controlled Congress, they made no appreciable impact on how we progressed in the last eight years. We (sort of) came out of this seemingly in spite of the trillions of dollars doled out to the US Banking industry in Quantitative Easing - making the very Rich, very much richer.

Makes you wonder who really does run this country, doesn’t it?