This is our economy and it’s time for us to take charge. Agreed? Read on.
From time to time the South Florida Law Blog invites people who I respect and are friends to post a blog. I introduce you to my dear friend William McCarty, an attorney who lives in the DC area.
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
Winston Churchill.
After three years of record low interest rates and $2.5 trillion dollars of deficit spending we still are no closer to jump starting a self sustaining recovery. Job creation is very weak, housing contracts are anemic despite historically low interest rates and prices, and the stock market is erratic and indecisive because it trades off of short term news rather than long term fundamentals. Even if we don’t have a double dip recession, a 2% or lower growth rate means that unemployment is actually increasing because we’re not creating enough jobs to keep up with our population growth.
We haven’t been able to jump start a self sustaining recovery because we cannot replace the unsustainable phantom wealth of rapid home equity appreciation, quick stock market gains and easy credit with the unsustainable phantom wealth of printed money.
So now we have to face facts:
1. Adjusted for inflation, individual income has been flat for the past ten years and real buying has actually gone down
2. In the near and long term, either taxes will go up or services will go down or both
3. Health care and college costs continue to increase twice as fast as our income
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