This video is making the rounds and while The Rebel Economist is indeed “Fox News hot” the real draw in this video is showing how even Obama’s most ardent supporters understand that a tax cut would be better for the economy than the America busting stimulus package that just passed:
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The tears of Obama’s supporters will be like sweet wine to those of us who foresaw the economic collapse worsening due to the government policy of printing billions of dollars of unbacked, essentially worthless currency and dumping tax money into Democrat special interest payola. Which will be good since this year’s grocery inflation will make it so that aside from the metaphorical feasting on others’ sorrow most of us will be skipping meals as food prices go sky high.
Hopeful that Obama can save the economy? Think again, as goes New York so will go the rest of the country and this Peggy Noonan piece shows that New York is definitely experiencing some of the hardest times anyone living there today can remember. This passage will speak more to people who have spent long periods of time in New York, but even someone who has only seen the city on television can in part appreciate the House of Usher like decline of New York Noonan invokes:
A moment last Monday, just after noon, in Manhattan. It’s slightly overcast, not cold, a good day for walking. I’m in the 90s on Fifth heading south, enjoying the broad avenue, the trees, the wide cobblestone walkway that rings Central Park. Suddenly I realize: Something’s odd here. Something’s strange. It’s quiet. I can hear each car go by. The traffic’s not an indistinct roar. The sidewalks aren’t full, as they normally are. It’s like a holiday, but it’s not, it’s the middle of a business day in February. I thought back to two weeks before when a friend and I zoomed down Park Avenue at evening rush hour in what should have been bumper-to-bumper traffic.
[…]
If you want to feel the bruise of what’s happened, pick a neighborhood full of shops and go up and down the street. Here’s Second Avenue in the 80s. A jewelry and consignment store on 84th has a new sign on the window: “We Buy Gold.” Paul is at the counter, spraying the tarnish off a silver chain. How’s business? “No buyin’, no sellin’, no nothin’. It’s a joke. People scared. They’re in shock.” Nearby, an empty storefront, a bar that had been in business only 10 months. The sign on the window—you see it all over Manhattan now—says, “Retail Space Available.” Next door, in a small beauty salon, the owner says “We’re trying to survive.” In September business plummeted. It’s down “at least 30%,” she says. July and August had been surprisingly good; her clients didn’t go away on vacation. In the fall they were fired. “They lost the job, so they don’t need to cut and color so much.”
In a liquor store just off 82nd, the owner, from India, says volume is still high but profits are down. “In business, if you have a product under $15, is good. People used to spend $70, $80 on a bottle of wine, all the bankers, the young kids. Nothing moving more than $15.”
On 81st, the kosher restaurant has closed. On 79th, the Talbots is gone. “Left a few months ago,” says the doorman next door.
Turn down to Madison Avenue in the 80s. A high-end butcher who’s been in the neighborhood more than 30 years is moving to the West Side because his rent has been raised more than he can afford. Why are landlords raising rents in a recession? It’s not landlords, he says, you can reason with them, it’s co-op boards that own a building. The people in the apartments upstairs are paying high maintenance, and they’re worried about their jobs, their businesses, their bonuses. So they raise the rent on the shop downstairs to cut their maintenance. When the shopkeeper says he’ll move and who’ll take his place in this economy, the boards say, “It’s Madison Avenue, we’ll be able to rent it.” He says, “They will for a while. But not if it gets worse.”
And thanks to unbridled spending in the guise of stimulus things will get worse. When I lived in New York I was given to hiking through the city and even several years ago when the economy was roaring you could see the creeping decay on the edges of the city. You could feel the quiet flight of overtaxed middle class New Yorkers and witness the third world poverty filling the vacuum they leave behind. No amount of government spending will make people return to New York, only the knowledge that the cost of living there would go down to more reasonable levels would reverse the flight of wealth from the city. Tax cuts like The People’s Stimulus would do just that.
Until then only the super rich and the desperately poor will remain.
But New York will continue to raise taxes, the federal government will print money and the left will cheer both on until New York, and most big cities, collapse. Welcome to the beginning of the new America, the richest banana republic in the world.