I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but during this week, for the first time that I can recall, the news stations focusing on the story of our suffering economy started mentioning, at albeit a minimal amount, the possibility of having another Depression. I sat staring at the television for a number of minutes unable to fully ascertain what I had just heard.
It had gone beyond the argument about whether or not we were actually in a Recession (had their been 2 quarters of negative growth?) for that one little scary word to come out.
It has been over 2 years now since I went from a $90,000.00 a year job, through a full year of unemployment and job searching, to my part-time, low pay job as an adjunct instructor (read part-time employee without benefits) at a Community College. I was in the first wave of losses brought on by the Bush Administration… and my wave has gone so fare as to no longer be considered among the un- or under-employed.
Now there are tens of thousands of us, no longer able to collect unemployment so no longer counted in the ranks of the jobless.
My wife and I have cut down on so much of our lives… the number of movies we see, the amount of food we buy, etc., that it is unbelievable. We’ve sold down our properties as well as we could (we had to rent out Elly’s former townhouse in Hagerstown because the prices were going down so fast that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to sell it right now… we were lucky with my Greenbelt townhouse and her other one on th other side of Hagerstown – that got sold just in time) and bought into a lower-cost part of the country in West Virginia.
The retirement funds I have had invested, some for almost 45 years, have started to go down because of the dwindling stock market, and I have no where else to re-invest right now. I can only hold out and hope that TIAA-CREF crawls back up before the year is over.
So… what would we all do if a Depression did hit? Would we get around the phenomenal debt that the Bush Administration has built up on it’s Iraq war that will be cursing our children and grandchildren for years to come (and continues to suck what is left out of our economic future)? Will our food supplies get so expensive that potential workers forced into breadlines? Will corporations and banks continue to get federal support while individual citizens are considered rubbish?
It sometimes seems that it could actually be so. And to hear the words discussing it uttered on TV hits a new and frightening low.
