EconomicCrisis.US

The world economy and with it social order are about to come flying apart. Environmental policies and environmentalists are contributing to the crisis by standing in the way of the wise use of fossil fuels to jump start economic productivity again.

Think about it. Greece is going to default any day, and there isn’t enough money in the European Union (EU) to respond to it. Germany is moving to the far right at the thought of having to bail out its extravagant neighbors. The welfare state as a functioning system is on the ropes in Europe at the very time that poverty, inflation, and high unemployment will be on the rise as the EU fails. First Greece, then Portugal, then Spain – the system has to fail, and when it goes down, the whole globe goes into a deep depression.
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The recent news that no jobs were added to the U.S. economy in August indicates the depth of the current recession. Meanwhile, the U.S. stock market and economy have been sustaining major gyrations and uncertainty due to an uninformed and misguided battle over the budget deficit and national debt among ideologues in the House of Representatives.

The problem was further exacerbated by the rating agency Standard and Poor’s when it erroneously downgraded U.S. credit standing from AAA to AA+ for the first time in history despite the U.S. impeccable record of meeting its debt obligations.
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Even some conservatives acknowledge the breast-beating about a balanced budget constitutional amendment is wrongheaded and more symbolism than anything else. And it’s not simply that getting an amendment through Congress is impossible.

Norm Ornstein, resident scholar of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the Washington Post recently of how “disastrous” such an amendment would be: “A sagging economy requires countercyclical policy, stimulus to counter a downturn and provide a boost. The need for this policy became apparent in the 1930s, after the opposite response to economic trouble caused a dizzying collapse. Its application… succeeded in pulling the U.S. out of the Depression. Countercyclical policy is what every country employed when the credit shock hit in 2008, to avoid a global disaster far more serious than the one we faced. Under a balanced-budget amendment, no countercyclical policy could emanate from D.C.”
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The U.S. my is doing great.

Now, I know what you are thinking: Is Peter nuts? We could be facing a double-dip recession. Home prices are still plunging. Real unemployment is above 16%, and job creation is anemic. What’s great about that?

Given the scope of the financial meltdown, it’s hard to imagine things could have been much better than they are now – and very easy to imagine things could have been much worse.

The problem is that government, for possibly good reasons, failed to level with the American people about just how bad things were.
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