Thursday, December 16, 2010

The New American Depression

When I look at the following picture...

Click to Enlarge

I do a quick mental calculation: There are roughly 300 million Americans, which means there are roughly 120 million houses. If the typical house lasts 80 years before it needs to be torn down and replace, then the average rate of house building should be 1.5 million/year. But it is down at 0.5 million/year and has been at that level for over two years. What you are looking at is a depression.

The last two years have taken on the character of the Great Depression. My feelings about Obama have moved from being one of "he's the guy who will turn things around" to one where I now think of him as another Herbert Hoover. Yeah... he's got credentials. Yeah, he's supposed to care about the poor and the under-privileged (Hoover did relief work in post WWI Europe, Obama was a street organizer in Chicago). But fundamentally both men failed as leaders. They simply didn't have the courage to act on a scale and scope that would stop the tide of bad news. Under both the economy wallowed, stalled on the high seas during a severe storm. Both were "nice guys" but utterly incompetent at mobilizing resources on a scale needed to fix the problem. Both were "unreal" in that they never seemed to "get it", to really understand the scale and scope of the problem. And both were far too conservative in their personality to try any radical solutions. Neither was willing to mobilize the public with a challenge to rise to the occasion and turn back the tide. Sad.

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