And why am I in this handbasket?

Update: See this Huffington Post article by Mike Lux for more on this topic.

I’m worried about the United States economy. I believe the “Great Recession” of 2007-2008 may have been small potatoes next to the turmoil to come. With the recent debt ceiling negotiations, as with many policy compromises in Washington in recent years, we have seen absolutely no room for the sort of dramatic policy shifts our country requires.

Nate Silver of the New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight just wrote a post examining the long term trends in U.S. GDP, and concluded that…hold onto something…we’re in pretty bad shape, relative to the norm. Read the whole post for more details, but I just wanted to show you this graph without all the overwhelming text of the main article:

If we’re going to get out of this bind, we need to pay for the services our country needs by raising federal taxes on the weathiest among us and on those behaviors that are harmful to our society in the long run. This must be done at the national level in most instances. We need to raise our intensity on this issue, and hope that those efforts are not too late. If we cannot fix our problems, there will be even more suffering.

One Reply to “And why am I in this handbasket?”

  1. Yes. the economic situation seems dire and the current political climate seems endlessly deadlocked. As we used to say in the Navy – “Situation normal; all fouled up.” We are probably in for several years of economic doldrums, high unemployment. IT’ll get better eventually. Cheer up.

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