Are You Seeing What I’m Seeing?

Quinn’s impression of Montgomery County PA is daunting. He sees trouble in what demographics say should be a prosperous, flourishing community where the residents live lives of relative affluence. The cheap-oil-based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary-of-consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The signs are all there, and they point to a bleak future. “An unsustainable paradigm,” he writes, “can’t be sustained.”

Quinn discusses existing home sales, private housing under construction, the decline of median household income, mall vacancy rates, office vacancy rates, personal consumption expenditures, household credit market debt outstanding, and the labour force participation rate.

“The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.

A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.

To read James Quinn article: Are You Seeing What I’m Seeing?

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Tagged as: Debt, McMansion, Middle America, Middle class, Student loan, Urban sprawl, Wall Street