State of Decline
by Paul Krugman

From smog to silicon, from the sexual revolution to the tax revolt, the future has usually arrived in California first. Now the Golden State is degenerating into a banana republic. Can the nation be far behind?

The recall isn't just a case of hardball politics. It's also a grand act of evasion: in the face of a severe fiscal crisis, voters are being invited to focus not on hard choices but on personality. Replacing Gray Davis with someone more likable isn't going to pay the bills.

And California's slide into irresponsibility, in which politicians refuse to acknowledge any connection between the government services the public demands and the taxes that pay for those services, is being replicated all across America.
[more]

It isn't just the politicians who have this disconnect between taxes and services. There is a demagogue in our lovely state of Washington who has made a career of getting Initiatives passed that reduce taxes. Then the people who voted to reduce taxes get upset when their services are reduced. Go figure. There is this idea that government and taxes are evil and that if only government was "more efficient" there would be plenty of services for all. At no cost, apparently.

JobForJohn.com

Hello, thanks for visiting my site, JobforJohn.com. Last Thursday, July 24th I was "downsized" from my job of 3 years at a software company.

Later the same day I heard that President Bush's economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush's tax cut and its prosperous economic effects.

"What a bunch of BS. I'd like to give their PR tour a dose of reality," is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts--that this economy stinks, and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse.

  thanks to daily KOS

A job for John

They have a phrase they used called "cheap-labor" conservative. I like it, because it's true. We live in a country which is creating a ruling class of business elite and their spawn. They are creating wealth for generations from paper transactions. While robbing you of your future to do so.

It was bad enough when they took the blue collar jobs away to Mexico, now it's white collar jobs to India.

These people don't care about the security of the US as long as they make a profit. If we all work in Wal-Mart, fine company that it is, it will not matter to them. The fact that the social damage from living on debt and working 60 hour weeks is killing families and increasing various forms of dysfunction. But as long as there are people who will help create these massive profits, they just don't care.

Of course this can't last. Something will have to give and the days of raiding the treasury for the rich are going to end because Americans are falling behind in their living standards. Sixty hour weeks and no job security is what caused unions to be formed in the first place. People will fight back because they won't have any choice.
[more]

Hard Landing