John Robbins: How The GDP Is Leading Us Terribly Astray

John Robbins: How The GDP Is Leading Us Terribly Astray
In a nut shell, a good GDP does not mean that average Americans are doing well financially.
"The number of unemployed Americans has more than doubled in the past two years. Unemployment is now worse than at any time since the Depression of the 1930s. Millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosure. And tens of millions more have lost their savings, their pensions, and their retirement security.


These statistics are grim, but they say nothing of the human toll, the families torn apart and the lives destroyed. The numbers give no indication of the pain, the rage, and the hopelessness that now permeate so many people's lives."

We are becoming a nation that doesn't care about working people, the poor or the disabled. The pure unadulterated meanness that the GOBP party shows toward the 18 million unemployed is breathtaking. These are people who want to work, but can't find a job but the R's tell us that their just lazy.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote an opinion piece in Sunday's NYTimes entitled Punishing the Jobless in which he talks about the heartless political calculations of the R party in refusing to extend unemployment benefits.

"There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.


But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?


The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion.


By the heartless, I mean Republicans who have made the cynical calculation that blocking anything President Obama tries to do — including, or perhaps especially, anything that might alleviate the nation’s economic pain — improves their chances in the midterm elections. Don’t pretend to be shocked: you know they’re out there, and make up a large share of the G.O.P. caucus.


By the clueless I mean people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”


Now, I don’t have the impression that unemployed Americans are spoiled; desperate seems more like it. One doubts, however, that any amount of evidence could change Ms. Angle’s view of the world — and there are, unfortunately, a lot of people in our political class just like her."

Representative Ralph Hall is one of these people. He voted against extending unemployment benefits AND against the Wall Street reform law. So I guess he is a lot more concerned about the lying, cheating moneygrubber's on Wall Street than he is with his own folks on main street. It is nothing short of a scandal to behave that way in the worst economic downturn since the great depression