Government’s Economic Shuffle

by Tony Chavira

It’s amazing to me that in certain places of the world economic conditions are so desperate and the local populations are so riled up that an atheist counter-government organization can carry out terrorist plots. Seventy soldiers in India were killed on Tuesday because of Maoist rebels who live in the mountainous area of the state of Chhattisgarh. Though it seems sort of strange to read the term “Maoist” so many years after Mao Zedong, it’s not at all shocking to think that people are willing to violently lash out solely due to their state of economic affairs. I’ve read plenty of articles that have proudly and positively stated that the Indian economy was booming despite world market conditions, but we all know by now that there’s no such thing as the “trickle down” effect. Clearly the people of Chhattisgarh were left out of the boom, and now they’ve got some boom of their own to dish out.

I wouldn’t exactly equate the Tea Party movement to what these Maoists are doing, if only because people in the Tea Party have too unorganized an agenda to coordinate real attacks, too much lust for the military-industrial complex to attack American soldiers, and seemingly no understanding that the military is part of and funded by the government.

But in some ways they are our own, locally-grown, counter-government assemblage. Not to say that our government officials aren’t threatened with violence, but the fact that conservative-leaning protest groups have an inherent assumption that our military is the epitome of brute-force power keeps the violent insurrectionists in psychological check.

Cochin, India

That clearly doesn’t mean we have nothing anything to worry about. Following the world financial mega-collapse, we’ve had a few domestic incidents, including the plane that was flown into the IRS building and that crazy Christian Militia group in Michigan that was taken down by the FBI, but I doubt we have any domestic threat large enough to endanger the structure of our government or economy (despite the distraughtly divided design of our socioeconomic structure). Instead, people have generally been pretty complacent, and still depend heavily on the social programs set up to help them: from programs to help people job-hunt to COBRA for maintaining some semblance of health-care to unemployment payments. Socialism is, indeed, on the rise ... and it’s doing a great job at keeping a lot of people in bad situations afloat after the free market spat them out.

The General Services Administration (GSA) has even begun to sell structures at super-discount prices to local developers, as long as they promise to do something with their purchases ... and if that’s not working, they’re more than willing to lease to the private market. The Fiscal Times wrote about how the GSA were auctioning off the 10-story, 127,000 square foot building where the National Institutes of Health used to be. It’s an interesting move, and almost too obvious, considering all the strategy Congress is dealing out to assist the residential and commercial markets through lenders. The GSA’s just selling the buildings themselves. Then the Fed can put out another bid for the development of a new building and instigate more growth. I mean, what developer would be stupid enough to say no to a government contract for a 10-story building?

And despite the fact that the housing market is crashing all around us, people still want to buy homes and the government’s trying to make sure that there are still ways they can do that. The U.S. Treasury is now requiring lenders to get back to borrowers about their loans in 10 days, hoping that maybe this rapid response requirement will jumpstart the short sale purchases of new homes or building spaces. This is a pretty big step, considering that currently a bank can wait months to approve funds for a short sale (which kind of defeats the purpose). In fact, Fannie Mae did a nationwide survey and found that 65% of all homeowners and renters still felt that there was value in owning a home, so someone out there’s probably looking to buy.

Unsurprisingly, the same survey also showed that 60% of people feel like it’s harder to buy a home for them today than it was for their parents to buy a home in yesteryear, and 70% think it’ll be harder for their kids than it will be for them. On top of that, about a third think that prices are going to up while another third think they’ll be the same. What’s most telling is that in 2003, 83% of people felt like buying property was one of the safest investments you could make, while today, it’s 70% ... that’s statistically significant enough to say that something’s up, and it’s definitely not customer confidence.

But what exactly do people not have trust in? The solidarity of the economy, the government’s ability to effect the economy, or both? The Maoists and Tea Partiers have something in common regarding this point: if they aren’t out there protesting the business tycoons who got us into this, they must (deep down) believe that government has the ability to improve or manipulate their financial conditions. They don’t simply want government to do something; they probably think it’s somehow responsible for their current economic conditions.

The government isn’t “keeping them down” as much as the economic interests of those who can grow the GDP are doing so. Our American society has spent the last 30+ years enabling people with lots of money to make lots more money at the expense of people with very little money. From “trickle down” to “less government,” the more organizations with money have, the more they’ll get.

But is this lack of trust the fault of government? Or do you think governments of the world are trying to fight this external influence as best they can—even if they seem like they’re failing?

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.