Paul Silver: “[I]t may be healthy for our society as a whole to ponder a wiser management of expectations.” Yes, and not in the way liberal activists view this wisdom, but more old-fashioned, boring sensibility, such as you listed that is being exercised in your own case. It goes for others as well, such as my brother's replacement of a medium-size vehicle with a small vehicle with a small engine that barely sips fuel and is perfect not only for driving in town in heavy traffic, but on the highway without any large load (40+ miles per gallon is nice savings indeed). Many of us never did things like take on excess debt, often to get rich quickly in the real estate bubble, and we correctly resent any demands that we be asked to “contribute” to the bailing out of others, who are suffering mainly because of their own poor, deliberate choices.

It would be remarkable in this country but a deflationary recession like Japan's after its real-estate bubble-burst that featured the “liquidity trap” brought about by people tending to save more than before (complicated by any behavior that was learned once deflation was in process, of delaying purchases in ancipation of lower prices) would be emotionally depressing here and painful, but wouldn't be out of the question and yes, could be said to be even overdue. (It's just that we who behaved ourselves shouldn't have to suffer along with those who earned their fates.)

A related economic subject is something Pew reported on long ago and is reporting again now, the current experience of journalists and how the media and its economic changes are affecting them.

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?Re…

Unless you have not noticed, those illegal immigrants are employed in fields like construction, food service, lawn care, etc that are highly sensitive to economic downturns. The housing bust has cause many homebuilders to cut back. That means fewer jobs for illegal aliens.

Having, more poor illiterate illegal aliens in your country during a recession is a very bad idea. The crime rate goes up. The welfare rolls increase. and they make it tougher on everyone else.

If there was going to be any pondering of those things you might barely be right. But that isn't going to happen. And losing your job and/or home is more than simply painful. I agree with most of your posts but it really bugs me when people minimize what the kind of downturn we're about to see means to people.

To grow the economy you need to keep growing the base of people using disposable goods. The only way to do that rapidly is to increase the influx of adults who can earn wages and have disposable income to buy disposable goods. Birth rates dont accomplish that. Immigration does.

The economy is always a mental frame of mind. The border states are toughening up on immigrants. Businesses are checking more carefully their employees. The Government is making some attempt at regulating and enforcing existing immigration laws. As a result there are fewer immigrants steaming into this country ready to continue the expansion.

A recession is simply a day of reckoning. A time when we have went on a spending spree and now must pay back what is owed. A time when we no longer have the available resources to continue to purchase. It is a natural correction. It happens regularly in a capitalistic society that is consumer driven.

I am all for raising taxes to punishing numbers. Lets tax everyone mindlessly so that we can have universal health care. Lets eliminate the military down to say the size of Canada's and let the rest of the world take up the slack. Lets go back to running military exercises with wooden sticks instead of guns.

Lets balance the budget. Lets let oil reach 300 dollars a barrel so that we ultimately find a will to develop alternative energy that renders the middle east inconsequential.

Im all for this. The problem is. Its never going to happen. We blog about it, talk about it, gripe about it then we flip a switch and turn on the computer, turn on our sattelite radio or turn on our plasma tv with 300 channels and watch live coverage of riots in Kosovo 12,000 miles away. Later we fire up our 35,000 dollar automobile and cruise in comfort to the store and shop in a supermarket filled to overflowing with the best and healthiest food in the world.

This is why it will never happen. We want to keep all this and have these other things too. The problem with all this is that these other things have been sacrificed in order to have what we have now. We can have one or the other. We cannot have both.

Not in the short term anyway. It took us roughly 100 years to get where we are today it will not be something Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama can accomplish with a few speechs or bipartisan love fests.