As a child, I spent many an hour building houses made of cards. For the most part, the buildings were unstable, doomed to come crashing down in the blink of an eye. The slightest bump of the table or a breath exhaled too hard would often be enough to bring about the immediate implosion of the shaky structure.
However, watching the demise of the dwelling was often an exciting end to an afternoon that was as tedious as it was time consuming. Seeing the collection of cards crumble and collapse was half the fun.
But now, as an adult, I’ve come to the awful realization that I’m living in a house of cards that is collapsing all around me.
Unfortunately, this is not child’s play. This is not a game. It is real life and it is no fun at all. In fact, for many it is downright tragic.
The house of cards I’ve been living in is no common card house. It is perhaps the greatest house of cards ever built. It is the U.S. economy and it is falling apart faster than you can say “fifty-two pick-up.” People are losing their homes, jobs and retirement funds. Banks are failing. The financial markets are plunging and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
The biggest problem with our current house of cards is that it has no base. Years of outsourcing, corporate greed and party politics have undermined our economy’s strongest support — manufacturing jobs. In the last 20 years, we have become a service-sector state dominated by money managers, insurance agents and health care workers. The U.S. government is now the nation’s largest employer.
But government produces nothing: It creates no wealth or goods. The only thing government makes are mistakes.
Instead of shoring up the base, we just kept building higher and higher. We increased our national debt, lowered interest rates and just kept printing more money while the value of the dollar kept falling and falling.
But we didn’t stop there. The house of cards got bigger, along with our trade deficit. China shipped us plastic, poisonous crap and we shipped them our jobs and more debt. We went to war in Iraq and borrowed even more money that we didn’t have to finance it.
The weight just kept growing and growing until the house of cards began to sway. We stacked card upon card as fast as we could — we built faster even than the base was collapsing. For a while it seemed as though the bottom would never catch us.
But then, we got greedy: We bought houses we couldn’t afford with loans and a market we didn’t understand.
Our lenders got greedy, too: They sold those loans time and time again until all accountability was lost. The housing bubble burst, and, with it, the house of cards began to lean. To make things worse, the table got bumped. Oil shot up to $140 a barrel and the price of gas hit $4 a gallon.
Inflation boomed, but we kept building our house of cards, propping it up any way we could. Ultimately, the severely compromised structure became more than the eroding base could support.
Now, the bottom is falling out — faster and faster, and it is below our feet. Yet we just keep scrambling to build higher and higher. We keep borrowing more money to pay off the money we have already borrowed, and keep printing more worthless dollars to finance it.
We passed a “stimulus package” that was nothing more than more debt for the taxpayers to shoulder. We have entered an era of corporate welfare with our bailouts and loans to burden our failing economy further.
Maybe it’s time to let the house fall to pieces. It is unsustainable and the people should have condemned it long ago. Let it fall and see what still stands. Then we can start rebuilding.
If we think we can maintain our collapsing economy forever, we’re crazy. In fact, we haven’t been playing with a full deck for quite a while. For too long, our house of cards has been built by suicide kings on Wall Street and jokers in Washington, D.C.
No wonder it’s crumbling around us.
Contact Jeremy Madden at madden@maddenamerica.com.
