An Inconvenient Economic Truth

(This blog update was orignally a reply to Matt's Facebook status. It then became a private message, and finally became so large I decided to post it on Mujou instead. Matt's status read, "People buying more necessities with credit + drastic shrink in consumer credit = big disaster looming? http://tinyurl.com/64oxjz.")

The ugly reality of forestalling the inevitable crash finally rears its head: the bankruptcy of tens of thousands of families. It's easy for a next-gen or younger person to brush the prospects of a depression off when all they see it as are fewer people going to movies, fewer books being sold, and vague increases in unemployment. "People have less spending money," they think. "Boo friggin' hoo. Suck it up!" It's a lot harder when they see people wasting away into skeletons on the sidewalks of Suburbia. That's when it hits them: this isn't about people whining because they've been downgraded from Abercrombie & Fitch to Wal-Mart for their clothes' shopping. No: this is people gasping for life itself.

There's a lot of parallels with family planning, I think. If a man and a woman can't afford to have another child but the woman gets pregnant anyway, one way or the other that child is going to die, whether it be sooner (abortion) or later (starvation). Not because the parents want the child to die, but because their desires cannot change the family's impoverished circumstances. The same horrifying situation is facing us now on the national scale: there are more families in this country than the real wealth of the nation can hope to support. Somebody has to die! That is the grotesque truth we are facing yet still refusing to face, acknowledging yet refusing to acknowledge. And who is this "somebody"? "Somebody" represents the millions of innocents who were born into a world of credit during the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. Basically, *US*. We are like the baby in the family planning metaphor. We are beautiful lives, good lives, valuable lives -- and yet lives that, for better or worse, should never have come into being had our parents' and our grandparents' generations been more fiscally alert.

Long story short, the country's true wealth cannot support 350 million living the American lifestyles of richness, middle classness, getting by-ness, or Welfare-ness. Welfare will get the axe first, followed by the middle class and lower classes who will collapse through the weak foundations holding them up right now -- they will become the skeletons you see on the sidewalk, for today's skeletons will already be long dead.

I fear for myself most of all. I have no job and a huge debt. This is because I was promised that the debt could be paid off after school, or that even if Obama/McCain/[whoever] socialized health care that my debts would be adjusted, forgiven. I realize now that nothing could be further from the truth: Uncle Sam will hound me for every last penny I am said to owe him even if I remain unemployed for years and years because of a (now) surplus of health professionals in a world where Joe Schmoe can no longer afford to go to see the doctor. The only reason he still could afford to see the doctor was the magical phantom called "health insurance." But health insurance companies are going to collapse right alongside the credit companies, and with that collapse (or, in a best case scenario, "restructuring") will come millions of dropped clients and thus millions of people petitioning for Medicare status. And they won't get Medicare status because nobody will get Medicare status anymore. It doesn't work. We knew it wouldn't work but we bullshitted ourselves into thinking it just might. Because we're humanitarian like that. Even the rascally and corrupt D.C. politicians still want what's best for their constituents, if only for selfish gains of their own. They hoped right along with the rest of us, "Maaaaaaaaaaybe we can build something out of nothing!" No. No, you cannot do that. You can build something out of something, but you cannot build something out of nothing. You cannot pay off the debts of millions of Americans with the taxes from the richest thousand. It doesn't work, it can't work, and now we see that it hasn't worked. Whoops. So with the drop in patients will come a drop in doctors -- not because people have quit being sick, but because they have quit being able to go to see the doctor and have a phantom agency pay for it for them. So here I am, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, no job, minimal work experience, facing superior job applicants in a world of high unemployment.

Am I to take up the pick axe and go get coal miner's lung? It's funny: it's easy to say "no" until you've been there, starving and wondering when your eviction notice is going to come in the mail. I can't say as I've been there, but I've thought about it plenty because I think I will be there in little under a year unless things really turn around. I cannot in good conscience continue to bankrupt myself and my family (i.e. through medical school debts) if I cannot ensure repayment. It's that simple.