Dark economic clouds are gathering ahead. After six years of booming home prices, the great American housing bubble has finally popped, and the market is now on the verge of collapse. Tens of millions of families who bought homes at bubble-inflated prices "now face the prospect of seeing their life savings disappear." This development will have wide-ranging effects on the American economy. "Over the last few years," writes Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, "most good U.S. economic news has been the result of soaring home prices." With this engine of economic growth now broken down, America faces a potential future of rapidly falling house prices, rising default and bankruptcy rates," lost jobs, fewer consumption, even a possible recession." The dark clouds ahead may be a perfect storm hitting the U.S. economy.So, what is good about this?? Well it is really quite simple, though a bit abstract. Our entire national economic engine functions solely because people buy stuff. And by "stuff" i refer to the extraneous, unnecessary consumer items upon which a vast assortment of taxes, fees, tariffs, etc. are generated for local, state, and federal governments. Sales taxes and excise taxes, road user fees, transportation levies--all manner of funding of our infrastructure and services to just simply survive is predicated on convincing the majority of the population to keep purchasing things they do not need, that damage the planet, that corrupt governments, and create massive suffering. Without a home mortgage deduction on income taxes, without the capacity to pass on property taxes exemptions and deductions on other taxes, consumer would not be sufficiently financed to help the capitalists keep the economic system operating. And therein lies the direct benefit of the next global depression.
We have chance, a real and serious opportunity, to end the cycle of carnage and damage to our planet, to increase sustainability and social justice, to empower and use redistributive justice to enact participational parity, to reduce and constrain greenhouse gas emissions and so forth, simply by rooting for the depression. People will stop having money to spend on useless junk, and focus solely on providing for their families. They will be forced to travel less, reduce their use of fossil fuels, seek solutions to growing and producing local foods, design more cooperative and collaborative localized relations to function in the place of bankrupt governments. Our dependency on foreign oil, on products from outside the US, on maintaining this militarized empire to supply itself will be cast aside as more and more people find it absolutely necessary to reprioritize the very core of their survival, basing decisions on their real needs, and not on their whims and wants. TV's will turn off, when cable bills are unpaid in exchange for buying food. Cars will stop being driven so that people can access healthcare and cheaper mass transit.
These will have egalitarian benefits, as the rich and powerful realize that without a functioning economic engine, their peasant-serf workforces, who are supposed to protect them and their precious property, will have other, much more visceral and meaningful priorities. Gone will be the capability and capacity of the systems to evict folks from their foreclosed homes. Local governments will find it better to simply ignore orders from national and international financial operations, and focus their diminishing resources on providing as best they can for the people for whom they have allegiance (and a serous survival stake). We can foresee the end of recreational vehicle toys and use, we can envision the end of large scale movement of crappy GE and GMO foods around the planet and country, we can finally take a breath from the onslaught of capitalists demanding we keep them happy.
Depression or planetary salvation? You make the call.
