The Economy: Is The Party Over Yet?

Dandy Don Meredith, one of the early commentators on Monday Night Football, used to start singing when the situation for one of the teams became hopeless, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over … .” Is it time to start singing that again?
It’s been—I will use the vernacular—one helluva party. There’s just no other way to describe it. Never before in human history has so much power been concentrated in the hands of one nation. The entire budget of the ancient Roman Empire was perhaps twenty to thirty million.
We spend that kind of money to improve a few highway ramps. Land that was top grade farm land only fifty years ago now stretches for miles and miles of malls, houses, streets and factories. I can show it to you in Grand Rapids, New York City, the area around Washington, and in New Jersey.
It’s true everywhere. If there were riots or embarrassing report cards for our schools, poor hospitals—we threw money at the problem. At all problems. We dropped more bombs on the southern half of Vietnam than we exploded in all of World War II. When we walked out, we left enough equipment behind to make the northern half a semi-world power for awhile.
Hitler launched his whole blitzkrieg offensive with only 2000 tanks. In the 1970s, the Pentagon mislaid 5,000 tanks in West Germany that it couldn’t find for awhile. We sent mission after mission to the moon—at vast cost and with no idea what to do once we got there.
If the Russians were going to launch Sputnik, we’d show them what real rocketeers could do—cost be hanged. Every plane, every submarine, every vehicle and rifle we designed had a cost overrun. So what—we were lottery winners after 1945, just dip into the bottomless cookie jar.
We spent some of the money wisely. Millions of G.I.s came home after the war able to buy houses. That set off a building boom a Nero or Nebuchadnezzar could only envy. What Caesar every put up as many buildings as the G.I. Bill.
Over two million ex-service men got college degrees. Millions more took classes. We went, overnight, from a nation where a high school was a rarity outside city limits to a land where college was expected by an enormous percentage of the populace, urban or rural.
The “middle class”, the realm of “salary men” and high paid blue collar workers, expanded at a rate and to a level never experienced before in any society in history. It all originated in those two cookie jars—World Wars One and Two. There was something new under the sun. The party raged on at levels never seen before outside of an oriental palace.
It became pure corporate welfare. “Clerks” who, in Bob Crochet’s London, had been paid a couple of shillings (twenty shillings to a pound and twelve pennies to a shilling) a week now pushed their papers in the bowels of enormous corporations for enough money to buy a home Scrooge might have envied. They got health insurance, vacations and pensions on top of it.
It all began with that cookie jar. When the cookie jar couldn’t come up with enough cash, we used our vast credit machinery to borrow—from ourselves, from every nation with a currency on the face of this earth. After all, we were the “Wall Street Imperialists”.
The time has come to look at the assumptions we made more than half a century ago about the new middle class and its permanency and start asking, What if it isn’t really so?
The cookie jar is empty. The credit rating looks less and less good as other nations become loath to buy any more of our bonds (read loan us more money). What if last fall was just a sharp reminder that sometimes parties really do come to an end?
Sometimes everything turns back into a pumpkin and mice. Only the glass slipper may be left. And then we may have to join Dandy Don. Will we have any idea what to do next?