Runaway Piano So, dear reader, are you feeling The Pinch yet? Oh, my; now that's a phenomenon... An abstract question like that, utterly devoid of the kind of information that would be necessary to formulate any sort of reply, and immediately you understand exactly what I'm talking about. As you know, "The Pinch" is inflation, which shills like Rush Limbaugh and Alan Greenspan say is not affecting the economy. By their standards, the economy is going pretty well (the rich are getting richer). For the rest of us, the lion's share of our earnings gets earmarked before we even punch the time clock: Taxes. Health insurance. House payment. Car payment. Bills. The economy isn't so rugged that hard-working Americans can no longer afford some or all of these material pleasures, but the costs have become the proverbial runaway piano, rolling downhill with ever increasing speed. Inflation has crept up on us, just not across the board. New computers and other electronic gadgets, for instance, get cheaper and better as the years go by. That's great and all, but the cost of health insurance has gone up 400 percent (or more in some cases) since Bush took office, for nebulous reasons that are often misstated by our ruling politicians and their minor league media machine. The same goes for prescription drugs. Our taxes have been cut (and so have our services), sure, but why is credit card debt at an all-time high among Americans, and why has our nation experienced near-record bankruptcy levels in each year since President Bush took office? With so many taxpayers on the economic tightrope, the Republican response was to constrict personal bankruptcies, protecting big business instead of the people once again. Conservatives proudly boast of having fostered an "ownership society". Indeed, a good many people have taken advantage of the low interest rates and building boom, made possible by the prosperity of the late 1990s, to latch onto a li'l ol' piece of land for themselves, and have watched their equity grow. But everyone else's equity also grew, so if you try to take advantage of it, you'll find yourself spending every single penny just to get into another home, one that is essentially the same as the one you just left. Besides that, the same economic woes that force so many of us to fly our plastic carpets smack dab into the parapets of bankruptcy have caused foreclosures to skyrocket. In many states, the price of homes has reached such a level that fewer people can afford to buy one for the first time. Mortgages will soon have to be extended to forty or fifty years in order for most workaday folks to make the payments - which means more interest for the bankers, and more debt for the consumer. With all of those injuries, we are now slapped with gasoline that costs three dollars a gallon. If you add up how much more you've spent on fuel in the last four years than in the four previous, you'll find you could have bought some kid (maybe even your own) a college education. And if you look at the grotesque coterie of crude vampires who have been banking record profits through our economic misery, you'll find they are all in bed with the GOP, and they're not exactly taking a nap. Our mighty economic engine is just like the engine under the hood of your car. We are all pistons attached to a crankshaft, and when we work, that baby really spins, and we can go places. On the front end of the engine, though, are all the accessories - air conditioning, power steering, electronics - and to get those pullies to run, you need to attach a few belts. Americans are pretty well belted down now, and the horsepower has been drained from the economy, which has been driven by consumer spending first and everything else after. Faced with a war that our leadership acknowledges has no end, we cannot expect to build any momentum, much less sustain it. So the deficits will remain, and the dollar will flag in the international markets, and interest rates will swell (but slowly - there's that old boiling frog theorem again). Now, though, even those priveleged, pink-handed patricians known collectively as the investor class are feeling The Pinch. The Dow hasn't budged all year; it's actually down a couple of points. When their dissatisfaction with the status quo translates into a clamp on campaign donations, the Republican Party will be replaced by that terrible minority, the Democrats, who led us to prosperity in the last decade, no thanks to the unhelpful and inept boors on the other side of the aisle. Conservatives like to say that "the liberals" are bereft of ideas. Maybe so. The question, then, is whether no ideas are better than bad ideas. If you look - even glance - at the Bush economy versus the Clinton economy, then you already know the answer to that question, too. Paul Heller 8/23/05 << back to the archives
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