Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

It's not the war, stupid

Attention fellow liberals: please stop saying that the Iraq war is causing the recession.

It's not. Okay, so the war is a giant waste of money and lives and everything else that's been dumped down that rat hole. It's causing a lot of problems, like destabilizing the Middle East and making most of the world hate us. But it's not causing this problem. Blaming the war for everything makes us look stupid and reactionary.


Major contributing causes behind the recession include:

  • Top executives creaming off the profit from the last financial expansion cycle, leaving little or nothing for a majority of the workforce.

  • Exporting jobs to foreign countries where it's cheaper.

  • Preditory loan practices such as payday loans and adjustible-rate, subprime mortgages: a leading cause of foreclosure.

  • The collapse of the housing bubble.

  • Needing a college degree to get a job above menial level, but needing large amounts of money to get a college degree.

  • Skyrocketing gas prices.

  • Skyrocketing health care prices.

  • "Insurance" companies that drop coverage to people who dare to ask for some of their money back: a leading cause of bankruptcy.

  • Leaving the minimum wage stagnant for years on end, then abruptly jerking it upward, shocking the market into a price hike that can result in a net loss of buying power.

  • Rapidly rising prices of staple foods and other basic supplies.


The war isn't even in the top ten. All it's doing is draining money from the government that could better be spent elsewhere, and it's not the government being broke that made the economy tank. That may hinder the government's attempts to relieve the recession, but that didn't cause it. It's the government and the business sector being shortsighted and selfish that caused the recession.
Tags: economics, politics
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  • 3 comments
arielstarshadow

arielstarshadow

April 14 2008, 12:06:42 UTC 13 years ago

Along with the college degree, I'd add in the fact that a college degree no longer guarantees you a job above menial level. The time when that was true has long since gone the way of the do-do, and it's time for that belief to follow it; in fact, it wasn't even true back when I was getting my degree, and I'm almost 39 now.

Couple that with the fact that our degrees have gotten so specialized that unless you have the exact degree for something, you're often out of luck.

A prime example - most liberal arts degrees aren't going to net you a nice job unless you want to teach at the college level (and even that is fraught with difficulties these days - you know it's bad when PhD's are competing for jobs that once they never would have looked at and would have gone to those holding Master's Degrees). My Master's Degree in history got me nothing but a large student loan debt. There was a time when that would have landed me a good job in a library or museum. But these days, if you want a good job in either of those fields, you have to get a Library Sciences or Museum Sciences Master's Degree.

There is such a thing as too much specialization, and I think we're there. How much farther do we want to go in compartmentalizing people so that their skillset is only good for one very specific job? That's a bad idea, in my opinion. What happens if that job disappears, or if the market gets glutted with people who all have the same specific skillset?

Education should also be free for as long as someone wants to go and is getting decent grades. If that means we pay for someone to get the BA or MA or MD, so be it. There also needs to be a serious shift in our thinking about career counseling, so that students know what to expect when they have that fancy paper. That scares a lot of the academic community because they know that the degrees they are offering are no longer of much value when it comes to opening doors for well-paying jobs and careers (which is a crying shame, but that's a topic for another day).
ysabetwordsmith

I Agree

ysabetwordsmith

April 15 2008, 02:31:02 UTC 13 years ago

You're right that a college degree doesn't guarantee a decent job, or any job; but it is required even to apply for most non-menial jobs now.

I also think this quote is apt:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Deleted comment

ysabetwordsmith

Re: I Agree

ysabetwordsmith

April 23 2008, 04:58:46 UTC 13 years ago

Well ... some work better or worse than others. Fascism is a pretty bad idea no matter who's in charge, and doesn't tend to attract nice people to begin with. Communism works pretty well on a small scale; variations of it are popular in intentional communities. Capitalism addresses some social problems neatly but exacerbates others to absolute disaster, as witness the companies whose behavior profile matches that of a clinical psychopath. Democracy is one of the better systems because a reasonably sensible populace can do tolerably well with it most of the time. That's because it has high fault tolerance: a lot of things have to go wrong, or affect a lot of people, before it starts to crash and burn. If the power is more centralized, fewer people need to be stupid before disaster ensues.

I suspect that a blended system will turn out to be most effective. One reason I'm fascinated by sociological science fiction is that I'm always on the lookout for new things to put in the social toolkit. Lately I've been enjoying the Ai-Naidari stories by haikujaguar.