Looking at the Economic Picture
Mon., July 21, 09:04 AM
I always say I’m not an economist. What I am, perhaps, is someone who has experienced enough to be able to recognize some kind of cause and effect when I see it. I am a Jonah©, y’know. However, five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote the following:
That’s almost prophetic, isn’t it? Who knew? But then, I often reread some old post and think that I wrote better when I began than I do now. Just now, what I am is angry. I read so much blather from self-proclaimed experts who can’t see the whole picture. Meanwhile, a lot of people are suffering, but evidently that doesn’t matter as long as it isn’t you who hurts.
Cheap credit — that’s about the best way to describe it — is at the bottom of the cause-and-effect tree, but I don’t think it’s the only root cause. If you read the real estate records, a pattern begins to appear.
I began reading these lists to find out who my new neighbors might be, but many of the buyers and sellers that I see listed are not buying houses for the purpose of living in them. They are real estate agents, and they are speculating. Sometimes I see a sale from one agent to another. If they push the prices up each time, there are two effects. The more obvious is that their own sales records go up; look how many of them are now in the million-dollar club. The other effect is that house prices are inflated. [Would you believe I just heard that on the radio? Hello? How come I knew it already?] There is no way that this Cheesebox is worth what the realtors list. Fortunately, the house is paid for, so I won’t actually be in the red if/when I sell it. Of course, if we had sold it when I suggested it to Husband, we would be sitting pretty. (Remember, “what-if” in the past is just fiction.)
I started reading The World Is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman, thinking it might shed some light on the situation. To anyone interested in information technology, the book should have said a lot. Instead, it made me mad; I started again and got mad all over again. You can’t tell me you’ve leveled the playing field, when all you’ve done is enlarge the gap between the haves and the have-nots. I also see a disturbing parallel between bringing illegal aliens into the U.S. to provide cheaper labor and exporting customer service jobs to countries where “five people will work for what it costs to pay just one person here.” If one practice is bad, so is the other.
If they are saving so much money, why are they not passing it on to their customers? Not to mention that, having “dumbed down” the requirements for customer service, the service suffers. That’s bad enough when they are providing jobs for Americans who aren’t too swift; it’s unconscionable when it doesn’t benefit anyone here. What I was reading was simply an apologia for the kind of business practices I abhor. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that Mr. Friedman knows it too, or he would not feel the need to apologize.
When I had a Dell computer, I was happy with the online help — until the day came when I couldn’t put the computer on. Then I had to telephone, speaking to a guy who was telling me to do something for which I didn’t have the strength. So I got the information for my son to call him back. My son knows something about computers (to put it mildly), but he didn’t know what was the trouble with this one. So he followed the instructions, which didn’t seem to work, and the “helper” referred him to another assistant. That was when we found out that the instructions merely fried the motherboard. They sent us another one, which didn’t work either, and eventually sent us an appropriate replacement. The customer service stank, as far as I was concerned, and next time my Dell gave me a problem, I took it to a competitor (gasp!), who fixed it just fine.
I guess that “level playing field” explains why my current computer is not a Dell. I don’t deal with companies that have poor customer service. It also explains why we are using AT&T rather than Sprint or Verizon. I digress yet again.
I always feel bad when nefarious manipulators turn something good into something bad. Credit cards have a great potential for good, until someone decides to make a career of stealing identities. The internet should have been the best thing we had; then we discovered we needed things like virus protectors and firewalls and spam blockers.
Until individuals realize that the good things should benefit everyone, not just a select few, we are going to have problems. I can only hope that the coming elections will bring a new viewpoint into play. We don’t need another jackass telling us everything is fine, just because he says so. “Just take a deep breath,” he says. It may be all you can do; they’re not charging for air — yet.
