Borrowed itself to death

Roger Waters (he of Pink Floyd fame) release a solo album called "Amused to death", it happens to be one of my favourites. I don't play it very often because it is a monumental downer but once in a while I'll find a spare hour, crank it up and tune out. The recurring theme is "This species has amused itself to death" and you really can't get more direct, and I believe, accurate than that. As living standards have increased the focus of humanity, at least in this country, has increasingly been on amusing ourselves and everything connected with that goal. Now I don't really have a problem with being amused - but as the be all and end all of existence? No way. It sounds far too much like plug in, tune out, f**k reality. In fact one of the definitions of amused is "diverted" which matches perfectly my perception of America's with obsession with amusement over actual living.

Anyway, that's all a long digression to eplain the title of this blog entry "Borrowed itself to death" which came to me after reading The Straight Truth about the Bush Economy". As I read it I started hearing the words "This country has borrowed itself to death". Actually the article starts off sounding like its supportive of Bush, but quickly segways to explaining pretty much all the economic good stuff is as a result of bad stuff. That is declining real wages, increasing poverty, a shrinking pool of people in the workforce, and massive increases in government borrowing and massive and historic decrease in personal saving (now at -2%).

The bottom line is the US is borrowing $3 billion dollars a day to sustain its current "recovery" and one can only wonder how long it will be before we are back on the nose dive trajectory again. If we are lucky it will be before the end of the reign of Emporer Bush II - if its after he's out of office we risk the shit hitting the fan during a democratic presidential term and then having to endure endless finger pointing from Republicans claiming it was the Democrats who screwed things up.