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An explanation of why the cost-of-living discussion seems so divorced from reality.
The article I got it from, which tells us what we already knew about why people don't buy as much these days as the retailers want us to.
Really, you can't just keep on taking money out of the system, and laying people off, and cutting their wages, and cutting off their hopes of promotion, and cutting the services you provide to them, and expect them to have money to spend on things.
And while I'm talking about this, while I'm worried about myself and my contemporaries too, I do wish we'd take a moment out of discussing what they're doing to us old folks (threatening out lives, actually) to talk about what they're doing to the young folks (throwing them under the bus altogether). When you cut public spending in the areas of basic services, and infrastructure, and education, and research, you not only bring down the present quality of life and throw all these people out of work who are in the prime of their life, you choke off the early careers of an entire generation coming up. People who ought to be getting their start as young public servants are marking time with their degrees, squeaking by on partitime jobs they are way over-qualified for. People a bit younger are not even getting the qualifications because the colleges have cut back on the classes or simoply become too expensive to attend.
How is this supposed to fix an economy? It'll fix the economy, yes, in the older sense -- stick it tight so it can't move.
The article I got it from, which tells us what we already knew about why people don't buy as much these days as the retailers want us to.
Really, you can't just keep on taking money out of the system, and laying people off, and cutting their wages, and cutting off their hopes of promotion, and cutting the services you provide to them, and expect them to have money to spend on things.
And while I'm talking about this, while I'm worried about myself and my contemporaries too, I do wish we'd take a moment out of discussing what they're doing to us old folks (threatening out lives, actually) to talk about what they're doing to the young folks (throwing them under the bus altogether). When you cut public spending in the areas of basic services, and infrastructure, and education, and research, you not only bring down the present quality of life and throw all these people out of work who are in the prime of their life, you choke off the early careers of an entire generation coming up. People who ought to be getting their start as young public servants are marking time with their degrees, squeaking by on partitime jobs they are way over-qualified for. People a bit younger are not even getting the qualifications because the colleges have cut back on the classes or simoply become too expensive to attend.
How is this supposed to fix an economy? It'll fix the economy, yes, in the older sense -- stick it tight so it can't move.
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