Living standards ebb

Swine (sorry pork producers) flu may be abating at least for now, the stress tests don't break bankers into too much of a sweat, and the car companies will survive, if barely (did we have any doubts?). A few U.S. companies scramble to make solar panels but we ceded most of that product's manufacturing overseas in the 1990s. And the market here remains suspect. There are wind turbines, but the whole wind energy thing hasn't gotten off the ground yet. Some people (mostly in West Virginia ) pin their hopes for electricity production on the ludicrous proposition of “clean coal.” The President talks about bringing back securitization with proper regulation (in the New York Times Magazine), but the new world order for the financial industry likely means restrictions which will reduce transaction volumes and the fees that go with them. Whether we get health care reform or not, doctors complain they can't make a living. The web is wiping out newspapers and magazines, while shrinking other media companies. And many of the other jobs in our country are brokers, accountants, lawyers and various intermediaries, which feed off of transactions and benefit from complicated tax codes which normal people can't understand and which actually create considerable inefficiencies.

Competing economies, meanwhile, can produce what we do for less (much less)–workers' compensation and benefits, space costs increase in places like China, Brazil and India, but are far below here in the U.S.