Sorry, I’m not buying it.
Spend! Spend! Spend!
That tired old mantra is repeated again by the experts at UCLA, who issue the quarterly Anderson Forecast (AF) on the economy.
Personal spending bought us part of this problem and more personal spending isn’t going to buy us out of it.
Not since Pres. Jimmy Carter has anyone said Save! Save! Save! And only a few far-sighted people have dared say Bring Back Manufacturing!
In a gloom and doom report authored by senior AF economist Jerry Nickelsburg, said when the financial crisis broke in September consumers went on a “reflexive reduction in spending.”
Duh! When you see everyone around you losing his job, and one major industry after another going belly up, your human radar goes up and your spending instincts go down.
They’re wrong; we haven’t gone into panic no-spend mode.
Unlike Congress, which reacted in panic to the mortgage meltdown and threw nearly $100 million dollars at Wall Street with no oversight or accountability (I don’t even lend my kids money without some accountability), we California consumers are being level-headed and wisely assessing our individual situations and pulling back on spending.
In their usual backwards thinking, some congressmen don’t want Detroit bailed out, meaning loss of a jillion a jobs in the auto industry and related businesses, while President-elect Barack Obama is talking about spending billions to create another zillion jobs.
They’re willing to sacrifice hundreds and thousands of jobs in a petty, spiteful attempt to kill off the unions, and at the same time a ton of new jobs will have to be created. That makes so much sense.
David Shulman, a senior economist at the AF, said "Make no mistake, the global economy is in its first synchronized recession since the early 1990s."
Synchronized recession? What’s this? An economic water ballet, and if it’s “synchronized,” we should be told who’s choreographing it so we can string them up by our diminishing assets.
These ivory tower-types want us locals, who are in fear of losing our jobs and homes to spend California out of its recession.
Spend. Yeah, right! Since we’re never, ever encourage to save, no one has anything for a rainy day, and it’s pouring out there.
Spend. That’s their answer to everything. Get dive bombed to death on 9/11 and -- in a time when every American was dying to do something constructive to help -- George Bush’s brilliant idea was for us to spend … to go shopping as if nothing had happened.
