Bush has declared that “I don’t think we’re headed to a recession.” And repeatedly uses words like “strong” and “robust” to describe the current state of affairs.
The Feds will be clinging for dear life to the “official” definition of a recession in coming quarters in order to declare the current depression to be nothing more than a minor “economic perturbation” as some are now putting it. Whether or not they get that lucky remains to be seen.
What is undeniable is that many Americans are getting poorer right now, whether or not we are technically in recession. Economic growth was 0.6 percent during the 4th quarter, but who can claim that expenses have not risen by considerably more than 0.6%? And given that income growth has screeched to a halt, a sizable portion of the American public can now buy far less with its rapidly devaluing incomes this year than it could last year.
The whole recession-denial movement is still predicated on fossilized Keynesian beliefs in animal passions which dictate that a belief in looming recessions causes recessions. This would be easy to dismiss if educated people in my own circles had not made statements such as “if the media doesn’t cause a recession, we’ll be fine.”
How exactly the media causes recessions is never quite explained, nor is the belief that the American public, deeply in debt, lacking any savings, and being paid in highly-inflationary currency, is supposed to jump start the economy.
It’s a Norman Vincent Peale philosophy of economics through positive imaging, apparently. “Visualize a robust economy and it will become true.” Unfortunately, that’s not how the real world works.
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“Visualize a robust economy and it will become true.”
There are many people whose brains are littered with affirmations. I call it magical thinking.
I have no doubt that the Bush administration knows it’s in trouble. Their main concern is to keep selling the idea that everything’s A-OK. Just as you give a kid a box of crayons and some coloring books, the government is going to send us some checks to keep us occupied. Meanwhile, the administration continues to believe that if they keep bailing fast enough, that the boat won’t sink before the November election.
Economic growth is measured in real terms, so you cannot subtract expense rise from that.
If you ignore the problem it will go away!
That is the philosophy that lead to the unabated growth of political elitism. People knew that the politicians were lying to them and that the system was corrupt. They thought that if it was ignored the problem would go away.
Now we have the problem of what was supposed to go away didn’t. The philosophy of ignoring it encouraged more of it and now we are back to applying the erroneous philosophy.
Notice the ‘action’ word in this philosophy – ‘ignore.’ Ignorant behavior leads to painful consequences.
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