I Feel the Trickle-Down! And it Doesn't Smell Like Roses! Nor Money--not Even Like Glade in an Outhouse!

Yeh, yeh ... I know ... the DOW has been rallying for a month or so. The recession is ending ... Life is good!

Layoffs are an easy answer.

They are also a boon to stock prices and the depth of the pockets of the millionaires’ pockets.

Our State Government simply didn’t do the work necessary to hit decent budget numbers that reflected changes in tax revenues. Layoffs, while still an emotional hit on guys like me—and my “manager,” a lovely woman who does a good job as an Associate Dean—are easy.

In my case, the previous school management just didn’t get how much trouble they were in and ignored problems so long that the only choices they had were drastic actions, including layoffs.

In the bigger picture, the 8.5% unemployment nationwide was a gross mismanagement dating back probably ten to twenty years—Republicans and Democrats—that allowed almost criminal mismanagement of corporate (not merely banking and financial) regulations.

But there are winners! Notice that Wall Street is coming back as unemployment continues to rise and salaries and hourly wages continue to drop.

My theory is that investors never stop reaping the rewards of such awful events as mass layoffs, jobs being exported to slave shops overseas and the continual “trading” of puts and calls of corporate stocks that have decimated my IRA (almost gone!) and 401K (gone!) accounts.

It’s not only the lack of employment that tears the elderly (that’s me!) apart; it’s the lack of that wonderful (so we thought) nest egg for when we hit 74.4 years of age--and now can do little more than pound the keys of our laptops complaining about life in this "Great" 21st Century.

In the eight disastrous years of George Bush’s reign, income inequality increased and there was no responsible government oversight of the stock market. This allowed our economy to free-fall into an abyss of debt. The Republican solution is still more tax cuts for corporations and the rich. When did that work? Answer: The Gilded Age. Who did it work for? Answer: It made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

President Bill Clinton was no better fifteen years ago. He and his administration abetted corporate America in exporting more American jobs so that investors on Wall Street could reap bigger profits from sweatshop labor in the Third World, leaving Wall Street richer and American workers poorer. But let’s face it, Clinton was largely supported by a Republican-dominated Congress. Nice excuse, Bill!

Migod! The Republicans and "Blue Democrats" have been chanting tax cuts and small government for the last 28 years and look at the results. They said tax cuts would increase wealth and investment (the "investment" went essentially to Third World sweatshops), and that the increased wealth would "trickle down."

I feel the trickle – it’s cold, clammy and it doesn't smell like money. It smells like sewage.

This posting is getting too long …