It's the economy...

I'm amused by the fact that righties like to bash Kos; generally the economic outlook posed by their diarists has been spot on and has been the very good for making investment decisions. Included in the above is this diary:

1. Real inflation paid by real people is moderately high.
2. Since wages are nowhere near keeping pace, real wages are dropping.
3. Real unemployment - that is the kind you and I feel, rather than the kind Greenspan feels - is also reasonably high historically. (Check out the graph).
3. Historically speaking an inflation rate of 5.8% and an unemployment rate of 7.2% is a crisis that calls for drastic government action.
4. That's why Bush is unpopular...

But wait there's more. (Of course there's more, that's what more means) Housing inflation is heavily weighted to the two coasts. Again checking the same numbers as before - only for the coastal areas, one finds that housing inflation isn't adding about 2.6% to places like New York - but closer to 5.5% This means that if you live in the bicoastal areas, inflation doesn't feel bad, it feels blood awful...

What looking at real economic statistics says is that the US has been hovering above recession for over a year now. What is propping up the economy is a huge binge of spending - both war time spending such as the Iraq war and its associated costs, tax reductions that pump money into the economy, and huge pork bills like the transportation bill, the agriculture bill, the perscription drug benefit and the new energy bil.

In short, Bush is attempting to take America down the same road that Japan took in the wake of their 1987 crash: build a bubble in housing prices to keep the ruling party in power, and then use huge public spending injections, and geographic gerrymandering, to prevent the economy from completely meltingdown...

The problem is that no one else could do that much better. You see, the divergence between the real world and the government statistical world, creates a policy bind. The Fed can only do one thing at once. The fed is in a policy bind when it has to do opposite things. The last major policy bind was in 1998. Greenspan had to raise interest rates to cut off the stock bubble, and he had to lower them to deal with the world currency crisis. A better policy regime would have realized that two were the same problem - too much money flowing into the US - and done one thing to fix both. But the FM economy couldn't fix that problem...

I'll not in passing that the "FM economy" is reall a misnomer here; it's more of a "preserve the national banks" system...

The bottom line is that the old policy regime that has ruled since Reagan is faced with a crisis. That crisis is that while the economy is doing as well as it can do in its current form - as evidenced by "good" economic numbers - that economy is not generating enough activity to keep people happy. Governments are tottering in England, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Japan - that is to say 7 of the G-8 - while there are job riots in China and India.

The economic statistics that show why people are unhappy - the inflation number with housing thrown in, the employment slack number, the GDP deflator with housing costs correctly calculated - show an economy in stagflation, propped up by massive borrow and squander policies.

Also great: this post on the quality of life in the US. Must reading.