How Will You Avoid Ruin?

We’ve known all along that The Great Bull Market that began in March of 2009 would end badly, mainly because The Great Recession that had brought the economy crashing down 18 months earlier is still very much with us.  Granted, corporate profits have been a bright spot, at least until recently (a modest achievement, by the way, considering the trillions of borrowing it has cost us to create the mere appearance of recovery).  But the growth in profits came at the expense of the workers themselves; for in fact, incomes have continued to shrink in real terms, accelerating a trend that had been waxing for decades.  With this has come a shrinkage in job opportunities that is due in part to a mismatch between the college degrees that are most popular these days –i.e., basket weaving and feminist studies – and a labor market whose expansion has been preponderantly McJobs and part-time positions.

Imploding Job Market

Employment prospects for the young can therefore be expected to implode in the years ahead, for several reasons. For one, baby boomers are no longer able to gracefully vacate their desks and free up jobs for the needy because most of the boomers are too strapped to retire.  To make matters worse, the money they had counted on inheriting from their parents has dwindled as the latter have drawn down their savings to offset the paltry yields engineered by our stupid, pathologically dishonest, corrupt, terminally inept Government.  And then there is Obamacare, presciently labeled “the worst piece of legislation ever” by the Wall Street Journal when it was rammed down our throats a couple of years ago. We have serious doubts that Obamacare will ever be implemented, since the program appears to be asphyxiating under the crushing weight of its own red tape. Even so, businesses have already reshaped themselves to Obamacare’s economically suicidal rules, including one that would make it prohibitively expensive to operate a business that crosses the 50-employee threshold by just a little.

And so America is in the untenable position of counting on 20- and 30-somethings for whom well-paying, stable jobs do not exist to finance Uncle Sam’s pay-as-you go Ponzi schemes of Medicare and Social Security.  For tens of millions of Americans, unfortunately, the only conceivable outcome is a slide into poverty so deep that it will make the 1930s Depression look like a picnic.

The Question of the Week:  What steps have you taken to avoid falling into this deep, dark abyss?