Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The New Normal

I've seen the Conservative Wahoo use this term to describe the eventual bottoming out of the markets. Jim Manzi over at The Corner, provides a pretty good description of what "the new normal" might look like for many Americans:

"We use the abstract expression “deleveraging” to describe what’s happening in the economy right now. That’s fine for a textbook or a newspaper article. But what’s really happening is that people are learning that the world is not as benign as many people in America talked themselves into believing it to be. Most middle class Americans are going to drive older cars, live in worse houses, and travel less than they thought they would even a couple of years ago. They will be less able to afford to move to the school district that they think will put their kids into the school that they think best for them. They are going to retire later, and have less money to spend when they do. This is painful and dispiriting. It is unequally shared suffering, and much of the distribution of relative pain is driven by luck, which makes it especially bitter to those who have been unlucky."

Read the rest here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am enjoying your blog so very much. Both you and brother, Conservative Wahoo are doing a fantastic job.
Love,
DAD

Anonymous said...

I think it will be (or should be) a hell of a lot easier for us to adjust to our "new normal" than it was for the American southerners in 1865 or the Europeans in 1919 or 1945.

Goldwater's Ghost said...

Dad - thank you for the sentiments. Good to know this stuff isn't necessarily drifting in cyberspace...

Riontifi - it should be, but aging boomers and the entitlement generation will kvetch, and it will be covered by the MSM as though America has never gone through a period like this before.

GG