Business Insider has a story online entitled, The Economy: Signs of a Slowdown. The economy is slow; it may be slowing still more. It’s hardly a high-octane magazine, but then stating the obvious doesn’t require high octane.
If our economy were strong, we’d have less reason to think about it. It’s weak, so it compels notice. For every person who merely writes that he’s concerned about the economy, there are dozens who are afflicted and suffer for its poor performance.
One could try to ignore the topic, but ignorance will bring recovery no sooner.
There’s much talk about austerity and balanced budgets, but we need more than a balanced budget (however hard that is to achieve) — we need cuts sufficient to reduce taxes on productive enterprises (to spur growth) and also cuts elsewhere to assure additional emergency assistance for those now destitute. When status-quo Republicans or Democrats talk about a balanced budget, as though that were enough, they’re doing Wisconsin a disservice.
In Whitewater, in Wisconsin, and in America, we should cut significantly on corporate welfare (subsidies), empty publicly-financed ‘development’ schemes, loans to business cronies, and supposedly ‘necessary’ services to able-bodied, middle-class people. While looking for wasted spending, America could do without dozens of amphibious warships to land on distant shores lacking any genuine and lasting interest for us.
Government should support principally (and respectively by jurisdiction) a reasonable police, fire, or national defense, and those services to prevent suffering among the unemployed, destitute, ill, or disabled.
When one hears that our economy is weak, one should be thinking about more — much more — than balancing a budget.
Now would be the time to try something different.