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THE
BUSH "RECOVERY
Car sales down so far in 2004. GM car sales down 16.8
percent. Car sales for Ford, Lincoln and Mercury down 20.1 percent. Chrysler's
sales down 23.2 percent.
With that kind of sales record and the loss of jobs that
goes with it, the economy could use something besides a Bush
"recovery".
Another Bush
"recovery" item is the housing market, long held to be a main
supporter of recovery. Home sales so far this year are down 7.1 percent in
January. And, if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, the housing market
is predicted to slow further.
Instead of
recovery, we have Congress considering a renewal of Unemployment Compensation
for another 13 weeks. The Labor Department reported that for the week ending
Dec. 27, 2003 there were 339,000 new applications for unemployment insurance. It
is estimated that the economy needs at least 150,000 new jobs a month to turn
out of the recession. So far, new jobs have numbered in the tens, not hundreds
of thousands per month. And those few jobs come in the low pay, service sector.
Bush's "recovery" reminds us of the "prosperity is just around
the corner" that Herbert Hoover announced in the bottom of the Great
Depression.
If you add to
the above the sad state of government finances, things look even worse. Federal
treasury is borrowing to finance regular operations as well as paying interest
on the national debt approaching $7 trillion. That figure of national debt, $ 7
trillion, needs close watching because it is closing in on what some economists
think is an upper limit of $12 trillion dollars of
U.S.
debt that would cause overseas investors to withdraw from the
U.S.
market. That would mean total world wide financial panic. There would not be a
single sound financial market base in any currency to finance world economic
transactions. It would be the Mother of all depressions.
Do we, or do
we not need another, better economic system?
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