Depressions, Recessions, Economic superpowers

The Party’s Over

By Alan Caruba
Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Gray skies are gonna clear up,
Put on a happy face;
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
Put on a happy face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy,
It’s not your style;
You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad
Ya’ decide to smile!

What, may I ask, is there to smile about in an America whose economy is in decline along with many other aspects of life in our nation?

I have been thinking lately about some of the nasty history I have lived through. The difference was that from the end of World War Two until the dawn of the 21st century, the nation was a superpower backed up by a super economy. That was then, this is now.

The party is over.

Americans need to understand what the problems are and what must be done to turn around an economy that is rapidly losing momentum to nations like China and India. We must have new jobs and lots of them. Instead, we are bleeding jobs and government at the federal and state level must take much of the blame.

We have been through bad times before. Many of my readers are too young to remember President Nixon’s Watergate scandal that began with a break-in at the Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972, and ended with Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You had to have been there to know what it was like to live through two years of slow revelations regarding the role of the president and many of those around him. It was a national agony.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Watergate transpired against the background of the Vietnam War that had escalated under Lyndon B. Johnson who, in turn, had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Anyone who has ever lived through a assassination never wants to live through another. So the war raged on with no end in sight and Americans marched, and marched, and marched against it. I was one of them.

Those were not happy times, but then, in response to the Nixon debacle, we elected the biggest dufus to ever hold the office until the 2008 elections and that was Jimmy Carter. As president, he was utterly clueless. The Iranian Islamic revolution occurred on his watch along with an energy crisis. As just one example, it was Jimmy who was the first to put solar panels on the roof of the White House and guess who is re-installing them again? The latest dufus.

Economists cite 47 recessions since 1790, and all were driven by bad governmental regulatory policies. And, no, we have learned nothing from this because the latest one repeats all the errors of the Great Depression; mindless government spending, even more regulation of Wall Street, and the failure to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. had recessions in 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960-61, 1969-70, 1973-75, 1980, et cetera. In short, there hasn’t been a decade since the ‘40s without a recession, but most lasted on average about eleven months.

Some mysterious group of gnomes recently announced that the present recession “endedâ€