Since the first hint of “bailout” legislation back in October until the recently passed federal “stimulus” package, we have all heard about the urgency of it all. We were told back in October, for example, that if specific authorization for billions of dollars of bailout money were not immediately approved, we would be on the brink of comprehensive financial ruin as a nation.
Well, none of that happened.
We are still here. Most of us till make house payments on time, most of us have not lost our jobs nor had our pay reduced. Most of us still go out to dinner from time to time and put a little away each month in savings. Except for certain hard-hit industries like housing and construction (which, admittedly, are huge sectors, the depression of which really caused most of the economic trouble we are in collectively), we are, as a people, still doing fairly well.
I have concluded that most of what ails us is the way in which our economic status is communicated to us by the media. Most of what we hear is bad news, even though most of it never touches us personally. If none of us had ever read a newspaper or watched a TV news show, or read about the economy online, we would never have known that there even existed an economic downturn. The bottom line is that most of the negative economic experience we have is almost psychosomatic.
They used to call recessions “panics.” I think that is an apt name for them even today.
Well, none of that happened.
We are still here. Most of us till make house payments on time, most of us have not lost our jobs nor had our pay reduced. Most of us still go out to dinner from time to time and put a little away each month in savings. Except for certain hard-hit industries like housing and construction (which, admittedly, are huge sectors, the depression of which really caused most of the economic trouble we are in collectively), we are, as a people, still doing fairly well.
I have concluded that most of what ails us is the way in which our economic status is communicated to us by the media. Most of what we hear is bad news, even though most of it never touches us personally. If none of us had ever read a newspaper or watched a TV news show, or read about the economy online, we would never have known that there even existed an economic downturn. The bottom line is that most of the negative economic experience we have is almost psychosomatic.
They used to call recessions “panics.” I think that is an apt name for them even today.
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