Category: Economy

Well, here we are at Thursday again, and the weather in my kingdom is too warm and too humid, and we need rain. That means I’ll have to go out on my front steps and holler ‘Send rain!’ at the sky gods.

Favorite winter dishes include scalloped potatoes with ham, with a really thick cheese sauce; a chicken casserole made with condensed potato soup, leftover chicken, some frozen vegs and a box of dressing; and (finally) hash browns with chopped onions and bits of cooked sausage thrown in to the mix.

Potatoes, as a food object, can provide just as much high nutrient value as a variety of other stuff. Someone once told me that you can live a very healthy life on potatoes and buttermilk. I pointed out that it would get boring after a while, unless there is nothing else.

If the late blight fungus hadn’t invaded the Irish soil, the Irish might not have migrated to America and become bakers, cops and teamsters, and whatever else was available in the USA at the time.

Potatoes are also an inexpensive staple food, as are corn and squash. Ah, acorn squash, baked with lots of butter, pepper and salt! Gimme some!

But this is a free-for-all post, so anything that will fill you up, including potatoes, and make you happy is okay.

Photo by Ex-PH2

It’s Thursday. Weekend is coming up sooner than you realize.

Someone wanted to know where to post recipes, since the “Recipes” column really hasn’t been updated in a long while. It simply got to be too cumbersome.

Instead, how about if we try a column where everyone can post their favorite dishes (and dis on each other, too)?

There are bacon dishes galore to be found and tried, one of them being bacon-wrapped stuffed chicken, a decidedly low-calorie dish for those watching their waistlines (as they expand).

So have at it, and enjoy the products of your fertile imaginations.

The veggies pictured are perfect for a chopped salad: yellow squash, zucchini, radishes, green onion and grape tomatoes. Add small chunks of beef, fish or ham, your favorite cheese – I like Roquefort for this – use a good vinaigrette dressing, and include a small, but insolent white wine and some crusty bread from that small bakery on the corner, and you’ve got a good start.  It’s also a good way to put a good meal together at a minimal cost.

 

The history of the Sears & Roebuck catalog is here:  http://www.searsarchives.com/catalogs/history.htm

First published in 1888, it evolved into the ‘everything’ catalog. House plans and kits were introduced in 1930. Mail order chickens were also introduced in 1930, and other farm animals, too, such as draft horses and riding horses and equipment..Any kind of livestock came directly from the breeder, through Sears and Ward’s. You could literally order anything available from these companies. This was the post-Civil War era, which is also referred to as the Gilded Age.

This article on the US economy prior to and during WWI  http://eh.net/encyclopedia/u-s-economy-in-world-war-i/  includes info on taxes, what they covered and how high they went, in regard to real income in 1916.

If there was a mild recession prior to WWI, was it truly ended by the US entry into the war in Europe, with the US government raising cash through the newly-created Federal Reserve? That was followed by a rapidly rising economy, a regular boom-time post-war job market, and a massive implosion in 1929 in the stock market (and there were warnings about it well ahead of the Crash).

The question comes up logically: does what happened 90 to 100 years ago parallel the present?

Financial markets everywhere crashed eleven years after the end of WWI. It sent economies everywhere into a downward spiral that took up to 10 years to recover, but was it prefaced by the US government’s bolstering increased production, including energy production, for WWI?  Note that WWI was the first time mechanized artillery (tanks) and aerial bombing (two-seater airplanes) were used. If energy production supports, boosts, and/or parallels a rising economy, that could explain the boom-bust cycle that began after WWI and ended in the fall of 1929.

I think there is a parallel here, but it’s not quite as plain as the most recent government bailouts have been. The probability is that, with this predicted recession looming, we’ll see a long, slow slide into it everywhere, including Europe, the UK, China, Japan, and Russia.

Can it be falsely propped up by another global war? And should that be done? In our current, very peculiar political and economic climate, it might be a bad idea.  Aside from ISIS, which is crumbling now, and a bunch of unwashed lefties, who is a tangible enemy?

When energy prices/consumption/production drop too low for producers to sustain employment, flagging recession and lost jobs/wages follow.  The original article is at Gail Tyverberg’s blog:  https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/07/02/the-next-financial-crisis-is-not-far-away/

From Tyverberg’s article: “In fact, affordability is the key issue. When the world economy is stimulated by more debt, only a small part of this additional debt makes its way back to the wages of non-elite workers. With greater global competition in wages, the wages of these workers tend to stay low. The limited demand of these workers tends to keep commodity prices, especially oil prices, from rising very high, for very long.”  Plainly, bailouts are simply more debt.

In plain words, an increase in energy production is directly tied to jobs, wages, and a rising economy.  Major warfare includes increased energy production. ‘Stimulated by more debt’ refers to government bailouts, engineered to artificially prevent economic crises from occurring.

From Bloomberg News: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-30/china-still-poses-a-risk-as-source-of-the-next-u-s-recession

China’s debt load is considerably higher than that of the US at 250%. This is supported by the following article from Market Watch, back in March 2017:  http://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-where-the-next-financial-crisis-is-lurking-2017-03-20

Quote from Market Watch article:  “ China’s national and provincial governments have subsidized inefficient state-owned enterprises and exporters with easy credit and propped up growth through excessive borrowing for wasteful public works and urbanization projects. Government deficits are estimated at least 15% of gross domestic product, and cumulative public and private debt at 250%.”

From Anne Pettifor, back in January 2017:  http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-economy-economists-predict-financial-crash-recession-2008-michael-fish-austerity-cant-solve-a7513416.html

Basically, the problems that caused the 2009 financial market crash and recession were not repaired or erased. They were blunted and bandaged by government bailouts. They still exist and will cause another recession. If we view this correctly, precisely the same signs that should have alerted people to a coming financial crisis in the mid-2000s are showing up again.

New home construction has returned to the overpriced McMansion state; rents in large cities such as New York and Chicago have skyrocketed; public transit fares have increased substantially; local taxes have increased as well. Food prices in large cities, e.g., Chicago, have risen not just because of production, location, and transportation costs, but also because taxes on products have risen. This is why I shop where I can get better prices for the same products I’d buy at larger chains. I notice in the sale papers that Jewel, which is owned by Albertsons, has dropped its prices on some produce items – but not all – and cut full-time jobs to part-time only, back in 2009, when the market crash occurred.

Bailouts were the answer then, but we simply cannot afford bailouts and handouts any more.  Those are a huge mistake that will cause more financial harm than anything else, including the predicted loss of funds in the Social Security Trust Fund and the constant manipulations of military retirement pay and veterans’ benefits, among other things.

The symptoms of a coming recession are clear. They are the same as they were in the 2000s, and are being ignored by the general public, by people who should have learned the first time around, but apparently did not. If this looming recession is exacerbated by the ignorant silliness of demands for higher wages by low-level labor, those people may find themselves out of work all over again and other people will find themselves using whatever savings they may have set aside, solely to pay the bills and put food on the table.

The mordant idiot spendthrift who was in the White House for eight years had more than enough time to solve the problem, but did not. He left it for the next sucker to get the job, and probably snorted with laughter on the way out the door, so I blame him for this next financial crisis. Frankly, I don’t think he gave a damn.

Whatever is going to happen is going to be a long, slow slide and it won’t be just us. The UK is also facing it, thanks to Gordon Brown’s ineptitude. Europe has had Merkel to drag it down into the mud with her dimwitted policies. China, as I said above is, quite frankly, in worse financial trouble than the US and may have no way to get out of it.

And the Queen Bee of financial stupidity? Venezuela. What has happened down there was inexcusable, but as Pettifor says, it was driven by ideology and stupidity, not by a sense of how to manage money and prepare for a financial crisis.

Boom is always followed by a bust.

Trump will get blamed for this mess, of course, even though it was not of his making. It will take too long to correct Da Stupid Mistakes that were made before he was elected. They could have been resolved by his predecessor and were not, because social justice policies and bailouts were more important, no matter how damaging they may be in the long run, to future generations.

The same thing holds true in all other countries that will be affected by this. As I indicated at the beginning of this article, it was the United States’ entry into the War in Europe that stimulated the US economy by the creation of the Federal Reserve, and the use of an account for the US government to withdraw funding to pay for war materiel production and wages, which included increased energy production. It was a government-sponsored economic boom early in the 20^th century, funded by borrowed money to the tune of $40 billions.

Unfortunately, that boom faded and a panic and crash followed in 1929, which fed into a worldwide economic Depression that drove Germany and the rest of the world into the same financial crisis now going on in Venezuela and beginning to show itself elsewhere. The United States’ entry into World War II followed on the heels of government-sponsored work programs, e.g., CCC, PWA, and WPA.

World War II was bad enough. Was it the last War of Conquerors? Do we cascade into warfare to solve this problem?

It appears that we may be heading in that direction.

Imagine my retro shock when I saw a story from the Chicago Tribune that Sears has sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker. Craftsman tools were the tools that could be exchanged if they broke, or replaced if they were lost or stolen. I have a toolbox with Stanley/B&D tools like screwdrivers, and while I’m not a tool collector, I did take that news as a peculiar surprise from the past.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the Good Old Days. But selling the Craftsman brand to Stanley opened the doors to the past.  We used to get the Sears & Roebuck farm catalog every year. You could get literally anything from Sears & Roebuck – anything – including dogs, cats, ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys, cows, sheep and horses or ponies. You could order a treadle sewing machine, fabric and patterns and sewing supplies, or just buy clothes for school. You could buy a farm tractor from Sears & Roebuck, or a stove and ice box, or a washing machine. If you did the laundry back then, you may remember the roller over the washer drum, a nasty contraption that squeezed the soap and water out of the clean clothes and trawled them into the first rinse tub, and then over to the second rinse tub. I was eight, so I wasn’t allowed to do the thing with the squeeze roller, but my smug, overbearing sister was and she got her hand caught in it. I think I told Ma I would never be that stupid. I was allowed to hang the laundry on the clothesline. That was one way I earned my allowance. Another was setting the table, doing the dishes and vacuuming and dusting. We were supposed to learn the value of work by getting paid to do chores, although I had friends at school whose parents made them do chores but didn’t pay them.

Now Sears (no longer Sears & Roebuck), the used-to-be go-to place to get everything, including canning equipment and chickens, is no longer relevant and is struggling. If Sears goes under, will that have an effect on farm people or anyone else? I don’t think so. Their employees will have to find new jobs. And you can buy canning and preserving stuff at Ace Hardware or Blaine’s Farm & Fleet. Farm folks can shop for everything at Walmart or Blaine’s Farm & Fleet, or if you really want a taste of “Them There Good Ol’ Days”, Lehman’s in Canton, Ohio, now carries Waterford Irish wood cookstoves.

Kitchen equipment used to make sense. It was for cooking. Now it feeds yuppie egos, instead. If you want one of those old stoves your grandma used, where she cooked like a banshee and made everything from scratch, there’s a place in Georgia that restores antique stoves like the Magic Chef 10000 with two ovens, a bread warmer, and a broiler, plus a storage drawer, six burners and a condiment shelf.  When I go online looking for a new stove, the negative reviews of the bells-and-whistles stoves that short circuit, start themselves up, and nearly set the house on fire raise serious red flags. I just want a stove to cook on. I have just about decided put my money into getting mine overhauled and keep it for a while. And I would almost give my eye teeth for my Grandma’s 1932 Roper with a four-burner range top on the left, and the oven on the stovetop to the side of the range, not down near the floor where you can’t clean under it or find those toys the cat threw under there.

More important in this nostalgia trip is some simple thing that we tend to overlook: what happened to my parents’ generation. My parents did not have tons of money. After World War II, my father wandered from one teaching job to another, with some of those schools closing within a few months of his starting to work there. We moved around like gypsies at times, until he finally got a job at a small university downstate, which he kept until he retired  We always had a big garden. He got baby chickens every spring from the Sears & Roebuck Farm catalog, and we raised those chicken for eggs and the dinner table. He rented freezer space at an ice company, which is where the frozen veggies from our garden went, until the chest freezers became available. There were some things you had to buy at the store, like coffee, tea, bread, sugar, flour, bacon, beef and other things used for cooking. For a while in my hometown, there was daily morning delivery of milk, butter and eggs by the local dairy, which is long gone now.

I started cooking at age 6 on the big, black gas-powered cast iron gas range in the kitchen.  I made ice box cookies, gingerbread, spice cake, chocolate cake (with cocoa powder, not baker’s chips) and I’d get one serving out of that while my sister polished off the rest of it. Those things never made it to the dinner table. We got yelled at if we didn’t clean our plates. It was that ‘children in China are starving to death’ theme, which at the time was quite true, thanks to Mao Tse-Tung’s moronic agricultural program that killed some 30 million Chinese people. But the servings my father put on the plates were too big for any 6-year-old’s stomach size, so after a while my mother started a long, long habit of filling the plates in the kitchen. That way, my father, who had no understanding of serving sizes, would not be wasting food that we couldn’t consume.

In junior high school, Home Ec classes were a requirement for girls and Shop classes were a requirement for boys.  They’re still available, but now they are elective choices. The trades now have jobs that were filled by those kids who loved to work on cars, or did woodworking and construction, or learned to run shop machinery. These people became adults who built Terex trucks for mining, or Caterpillar equipment for road construction, or found jobs working in building construction, and building roads and bridges. The skyscrapers in New York City, like the Empire State Building, and bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge, were built by people who knew construction. Many of them had left Europe to make new lives in America, and while they could not speak English very well, they understood the very detailed drafted plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, designed in the 19th century by John Roebling, a German immigrant.

None of those people looked for handouts or freebies. They looked for work.

If you want a job now that offers good pay, you don’t necessarily have to have a college degree but you do have to have skills like those roads and bridge builders and thos auto mechanics that were car-loving teenagers and are now retired or nearing it, but who have worked in every aspect of the auto industry, including racing. Now, you go to trade schools to learn those skills or get a journeyman apprenticeship in the trades. Back then, cooking was a skill that every girl learned, along with sewing. Now, sewing is an elective class aimed at kids who fancy themselves to be future designers. And cooking? If you couldn’t make simple chicken soup from scratch, without a cookbook, you weren’t trying. Now there is this bunch of people who call themselves ‘foodies’ who take cooking classes to impress people they know, a rather pretentious way of saying ‘I know how to boil water’. They could spend less money by getting recipes online or buying a basic Better Homes &Gardens cookbook   We didn’t have toys bought for us. We made our own. I can’t think of a better way to get your kids to be creative than to have them build their own kites to fly from newspapers colored with crayons or tempera paints, and some balsa wood and string.

Since there are jobs listed in the classifieds that are literally going wanting for workers, it’s not that there is no work available. Likewise, if it isn’t obvious that no job is beneath you, you haven’t been hungry or cold or trying to keep the roof over your head, nor have you had to stretch your paycheck to feed three kids. In some states, there is a requirement that if you want to get subsidies, you have to have a job and work XX hours per week or they cut you off. I saw nothing wrong with the ‘welfare to work’ idea. Bill Clinton started that program. It put a lot of people back on their feet until it was canceled by the Obama Administration. Yes, it was. Now there are people left hanging. I hope Trump reinstates that.

I can’t emphasize enough that the financial impact of the Great Depression was devastating to people everywhere. It was worse in Europe than the US, particularly in Germany, because it allowed a crackpot megalomaniac named Adolf Hitler to overthrow the legitimate German government and bring his heinous Nationalist Socialist (NAZI) part into power. WWII followed shortly after that.

However, in the USA, Roosevelt saw the need to put people to work because there was no unemployment compensation at that time, so he started the CCC, WPA and PWA programs which did put people to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps is responsible for the creation of the national parks we have today, like Yellowstone and Yosemite. My mother worked for the WPA for a year in California, and then went back to Chicago and got a private sector job. My father learned the skill of theater sets and props construction while he was in the company of chattaqua traveling tent theaters, the predecessor to movie theaters for small rural towns that didn’t have them yet. There were NO free handouts back then. You stretched every penny in the piggy bank to its limits. And those work programs had begun to close out by the time World War II hit the US of A.

Now we have an entire generation of kids who are either ready to enter the work force with undergrad and graduate degrees in things like systems engineering and mechanical engineering, or they are completely unqualified for anything at all.

By unqualified, I refer to the bunch of kids whose degrees are useless and qualify them for clearing tables at roadside diners or maybe working at McDonald’s. They should be out of Mom and Dad’s house but they can’t find those $50K/year jobs because they are unqualified for them. Anything less is beneath them. And what they expect after college is the ‘basket of safety’ they got from their parental units, who should kick their butts out and tell them ‘Find your own place to live.’ Unfortunately, the cold, cruel reality is that the ‘basket’ is gone for good when you become an adult.

And instead of looking for better jobs, they run destructive protests over a new US President that they don’t like because they think he’s ending the welfare state ASAP. He did not say that.  He siad ‘put Americans back to work.’

No, a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s is not a career position, but if it’s the only thing you can find and the pay isn’t enough to cover the cost of food and rent and utilities, then a subsidy is not out of line until you can get a better job.  You should be looking for a better job all the time. A permanent welfare state is unacceptable, period.

Take Al Lewis’s advice, best ever given: Find something that you love to do, and love what you’re doing. Everything else will follow that.