VoIP Tech Chat

The structural faults, many of them legacies of the 1980s, represent once-in-a-lifetime dislocations that will take years to work out. Among them: the job drought, the debt hangover, the defense-industry contraction, the savings and loan collapse, the real estate depression, the health-care cost explosion and the runaway federal deficit. “This is a sick economy that won’t respond to traditional remedies,” said Norman Robertson, chief economist at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Bank. “There’s going to be a lot of trauma before it’s over.”

America’s structural burdens have hit home most profoundly in terms of jobs. The U.S. workplace is “in a profound, historic state of turmoil that for millions of individuals is approaching panic,” according to labor consultant Dan Lacey, publisher of the newsletter Workplace Trends.

The latest recession has hit white-collar workers particularly hard, both in terms of layoffs and slippage in their real wages. “These people can’t believe what is happening to them,” says Illinois opinion pollster Mike McKeon. “They decided they didn’t want to work in factories, so they learned how to use computers. They were rewarded with service-sector jobs[...], but now they’re out on the street and no one wants them.” Open season has been declared on corporate bureaucrats. “The middle manager has gone out of vogue in corporate America,” says Lacey. “Indeed, the word manager is the kiss of death on resumes.”

One major obstacle to efficiency remains: a runaway U.S. health-care system, whose costs are rising at the rate of more than 9% a year and today stand at $2,500 a person, more than twice the level of most of the world’s industrialized economies. Such costs add 15% to the price of every new motor vehicle, for example, a margin that single-handedly threatens to eliminate the entire cost advantages achieved by Ford and Chrysler.

All of this looks familiar…same headlines we see over and over about the current catastrophic state of the economy. Why post it? Because these are excerpts from a 1992 time magazine article.

How about:

[...] plan calls for an $80 billion four-year public-works project to rebuild roads and bridges and create a national fiber-optic information network to enhance learning and to link homes, schools and offices. Clinton also wants a national education and retraining program, financed by a 1.5% payroll tax, for all employees from the mail room to the executive suite.

[...] would reduce personal income tax rates 1% across the board, saving the average family about $5 a week, which he would offset with mostly unspecified spending cuts.

Wow! It’s Obama’s change! Except that first paragraph begins: “The heart of Clinton’s” and the second begins “Bush”.

Just a moment of hope, because we have been in this hole before and the way out can’t be that different from the last time.