Doug Mataconis takes a look at today’s awful GDP figures and concludes that we’re headed for a long stretch of low growth and high unemployment. He’s not happy about what this means for our political future:
There’s a reason that politics in the 1950s gave us men like Eisenhower and Stevenson, and there’s a reason that politics in 2010s are giving us Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Alan Grayson, and the 24/7/365 cable “news” culture, and I would submit that much of it is related to the fact that people are beginning to believe that they are going to have to fight over pieces of a pie that isn’t going to grow nearly fast enough to sustain the standard of living we’ve become used to.
On my good days I think this is simply the normal pessimism that takes over during a recession. (And yes, we’re still in a recession in all but the most technical definition of the term.) On the other hand, household deleveraging still has a long ways to go, house prices probably still have a ways to drop, income stagnation is going to remain a fact of life as long as unemployment is high, and our political system is dominated by people who plainly have no intention of doing anything about any of this. So on my bad days I agree with Doug. There’s no reason things have to be this way, but we sure seem to have lost the will to change them much.
