One of the several things I do each day to put money in my pocket involves pouring coffee at one of my in-laws' conjoined businesses (a coffeeshop and a bookstore) in the foothills of Appalachia. It's a small town, and there's a lot of chat, all of it understood to be more or less public.
Most of the discussion of our current Depression involves dollar amounts and economic complexities which are beyond my understanding. The other discussions we have here involves kossacks who have newly lost their jobs, their homes, their health care. We have the micro and the macro.
I should like, for a moment or two, to talk about the middle ground, where I live.
First, some demographics. I live in a county of 22,000, median household income $20,055, median family income $34,338, per capita income $13,888. This translates to 21.3 percent of the population living below the poverty line. (All numbers from Wikipedia, which I don't necessarily trust, but they jibe with what the local Chamber of Commerce puts out, and my experience of the place.)
My county is the most prosperous in the surrounding area.
The economic engines which drive our economy are principally these: A small teaching university (student population under 10,000); a large regional hospital; city and county government; several small manufacturing plants; assorted big and small box retailers; a number of small hardwood mills.
Here are some snippets, by way of painting a more complete picture.
* A regular at the coffee shop, who has owned and operated a hardwood mill here for four decades, lingered over his cup of coffee, looking for somebody to talk to. "I've never had to lay anybody off," he said. He is a small man with soft hands, carefully ended hair, neat clothes. A big game hunter. "I just had to lay off 32 people." He went on to list all the furniture manufacturers who no longer make things in the United States, a business long gone now. It's the housing crisis that's gotten him. I wondered, later, if the men he'd laid off included the seasonal Hispanic workers some of the mills depend on, and then wondered if the U.S. economy had yet gotten so bad as to stem the tide of illegal immigration, a certain sign the American dream is waning.
* Over at the hospital, all senior management has accepted a pay freeze. The hospital is busy as hell, but fewer and fewer of their clients can actually pay for the care they receive. Only the lowest hourly employees received a pay raise this year. (There are some virtues to faith-based operations.)
* Standing in line to pick up my daughter from kindergarten, I overheard two women talking, though I don't know about which plant. "Oh, I've been furloughed," one of them said, "so I'm on unemployment. I'd rather do that than work half shifts and make less money when I'm done driving." Probably she works at the auto parts plant up the road, but I don't know and it doesn't really matter.
* Two prominent locals have built dream houses out of town, premised on their ability to sell their nice, older homes in town. These are affluent men, but not families with bottomless pockets. Both are concerned that the very careful, very reasonable financial steps they have taken over a long period of time are now unravelling.
* My wife, reading
The New York Times online this morning looked up from her coffee cup and suggested maybe we should pull our money out of the markets. (I hasten to add that it's not much money, and that I figured when we put it in the markets I'd never see it again. But I'm wired that way: Never gamble what you can't afford to lose. Poker according to the Maverick, a funny way to learn economics, but it's served me well.) My answer is that at this juncture that only makes sense if you believe the markets will never come back. Otherwise...
* The university took a three percent cut last year, and a two percent cut this year. Those numbers may not be exactly right, but it doesn't matter. They expect another round of cuts when the fiscal year's tax receipts are better accounted for.
* The two retail chains which sold clothing in our town (and were not named WalMart) have both closed, bankrupt. We now have one very small boutique clothing store, several Carhart outlets that principally sell seeds and chicken feed, and WalMart. Or an hour-long drive to the big city. Or catalogues.
* I troll eBay looking for obscure graphic design books. The national market largely eliminated my ability to buy things nobody wanted locally for a good price, but every once in a while I get lucky. Last night, fiddling, I looked for the first time in months. Prices have gone up. Way up. It wasn't clear to me that anybody was buying, but...my sense was that people were trying to sell things for what they used to be worth, not their present market value. (A local eBay dealer tells me her market has tanked there. Maybe graphic designers are...oh, fill in the blank yourselves!)
I don't know what this adds up to, save that we are in for several long seasons of fear. But here are some guesses:
(1) We can't fuel a consumer economy without good, middle-class paying blue collar jobs.
(2) That means we have to make real, tangible things here. I do not mean to be protectionist; I am not opposed to free trade, and I have no interest in wrangling with what that means in the real world. I simply mean that it is catastrophic for a society to lose the skills required to make things.
(3) Cheap is not the highest good. We have to somehow get past the notion that just because WalMart can sell it for two cents less than your corner grocer (or a dollar more, if you don't watch carefully...I'm told...we don't shop there) that is somehow better. Even in this economy. Especially in this economy.
(4) Big business has failed us. The bigger it is the more likely it is to fail. Businesses whose income dwarf small and mid-sized countries should not be allowed to continue at that size. Think about how U.S. firms adapted to the patriotic manufacturing needs of World War II. Yes, many of them did right well by that transition. But the point is that we had the capacity here to do that manufacturing, and what history I've read argues persuasively that that capacity is what allowed our dominance. We no longer, best I can tell, have that capacity on our shores.
(5) The people in my world feel utterly powerless to defend themselves against what's coming, past an increased interest in farm eggs and home-grown tomatoes (a nod to the songwriter Guy Clark, there, for those scoring at home).
I am not a nihlist, and the red underline tells me I can't even spell it. Much as I enjoyed the Sex Pistols back in the day, I do not embrace "no future" as a lifestyle choice. Really. But I am at a loss to describe a scenario in which this economy and this country...and the world beyond our shores...doesn't head into something like anarchy and chaos. I note with some interest (per diaries here over the last week) that the freepers have begun talking about Obama scheming to impose martial law, much as some here feared Bush would do so when the election turned against the Republicans. I do not seek, nor seek to embrace, the dark vision of the future which seems most likely to me.
But the system is broken. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, it's on fire, and a number of its key buildings have already burned to the foundations. We are running out of water. And, maybe, patience.