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Mark Steyn ponders what decline will look like.
… Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented pre-eminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything, and we would still be No. 1. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.
Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.
One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” – because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve. …
More of this from Robert Samuelson.
A specter haunts America: downward mobility. Every generation, we believe, should live better than its predecessor. By and large, Americans still embrace that promise. A Pew survey earlier this year found that 48 percent of respondents felt that their children’s living standards would exceed their own. Although that’s down from 61 percent in 2002, it’s on a par with the mid-1990s. But these expectations could be dashed. For young Americans, the future could be dimmer.
Along with jobs, the 2012 presidential election could be fought over this issue. “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?” worried a recent cover story in the Atlantic. Pessimism rises with schooling. In the Pew poll, 54 percent of respondents with a high-school diploma or less felt their children would do better; only 35 percent of graduate school alums agreed. “A kind of depression has set in,” writes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “We’ve lost our mojo, our groove.”
It can be argued that all this glumness repeats a historical error: projecting the present onto the future. Just because the economy is rotten today doesn’t mean that it will always be. After World War II, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel has recalled, there was widespread “alarm about massive unemployment.” Eleven million veterans and 9 million defense industry workers had to be re-employed. People feared a new Depression. It didn’t happen, because pent-up demand for homes, cars and appliances fueled a hiring boom.
Unfortunately, this caveat is only half relevant now. …
Last week David Harsanyi had a go at a manifesto for the Occupy Wall Street folks. This week Barton Hinkle from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a turn. We need this after the first two items.
We are the union members, students, teachers, veterans and activists who make up the 99 percent of America, if you don’t count everybody who is at work right now. We are the unemployed and the art majors and the interns for Rainforest Action Now!
Also we are the firefighters and the police officers and the paramedics, except none of them could be here on account of their fascist shift supervisors, but we know they are with us in spirit. (First responders, you guys rock!) We are the lost, the slightly disoriented, and the people who are pretty sure they know where they are if you’d just be quiet for one second and let us think, okay? Jeez.
Where were we? Oh yeah. We are the makers of homeopathic medicines. We are also the Druids. There’s a couple of Zoroastrians around here somewhere, too (or at least that is what some of us think the tattoo on the one dude’s neck means).
Also, we are that long-haired welder guy who makes bird sculptures out of rebar and old gardening equipment. We are Slightly Creepy Hippie Lady in a Van Who Sells Healing Crystals. We are the young woman with the piercings and the pink hair who just came from the D.C. Slutwalk. We are the guys in goatees and motorcycle boots who can’t ride a motorcycle, who are hoping to score with Pink-Hair Girl.
We are the 99 percent. And we are Here to Stay.
Megan McArdle does a wonderful job of tracking the green jobs money. You will be amazed where the cash went. She made a very good info-graphic that we are unable to fit into our format so you must follow the link to see more than the little bit in the Word or PDF versions.
Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison just resigned, as the controversy stubbornly refuses to go away. Seems worth revisiting the loans once again, since I’ve spent a little time looking more deeply at the program over the past few days.
Supporters of these programs claim that they’re a necessary part of winning the green future because these are investments that are too risky, or too big, for private capital to take on.
Of course, if the government is going to be a VC, supporters say, they have to expect a high failure rate. There’s a lot of talk about the manufacturing “Valley of Death“, where startup manufacturing firms may have difficulty getting capital to commercialize their prototypes. According to proponents of this theory, there’s plenty of money for early stage ventures, and plenty of bank loans for established firms, but no money for mass commercialization of new manufacturing ideas. (Hence the “valley”). This valley, they say, is especially wide for energy firms, because the capital costs for starting up are so high.
I’ve been somewhat skeptical of those claims–why are people pouring money into manufacturing startups if they’re inevitably doomed to die at the commercialization stage? But say it’s true. I thought it was worth looking at who got the money from these programs, and for what. How well is the government doing in its role of VC/valley of death sherpa?
So I went to the DOE’s website and manually copied the data on the loan programs. I didn’t scrutinize all of the projects–I’ve already spent more time on this than is probably justified. But I looked at the biggest ones. I put all the number into pretty graphs. And then I thought I’d share those graphs with you, because hell, I have them.
What I’m trying to say is, I just made my first infographic. …
Michael Barone celebrates the end of high speed rail.
Dead. Kaput. Through. Finished. Washed up. Gone-zo.
That, I think, is a fair description of the Obama administration’s attempt to build high-speed rail lines across America.
It hasn’t failed because of a lack of willingness to pony up money. The Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects. The Democratic Congress appropriated another $2.5 billion.
But Congress is turning off the spigot. The Republican-controlled House has appropriated zero dollars for high-speed rail. The Democratic-majority Senate Appropriations Committee has appropriated $100 million in their budget recommendation.
That’s effectively “a vote of ‘no confidence’ to President Obama’s infrastructure initiative,” concludes transportation analyst Ken Orski, “a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful spending.” …