David Michael Bruno

Why People Don't Want to Pay For News - It's Worthless

Not all news. But most of it.

  

Portraits of Our Economic Meltdown: Oil

This is not a jeremiad against petroleum. But don’t expect to chant “drill, baby, drill” after reading this either.

Have a look at this infograph detailing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Did you see the very bottom? Over 3,800 oil wells in the Gulf. I suppose that after drilling so many wells and having so much success, it is understandable that the technology and attitudes that perfected getting oil out of the earth were casual about preventing disaster. It seemed like it would never happen. It did.

Long before humans perfected the use of fossil fuels, however, we perfected the use of CYA. That’s why BP and the U.S. government aren’t being honest about the extent of the oil spilled into the Gulf. For weeks I’ve been griping to friends that there isn’t just one leak. We heard early on that there are at least three leaks. But all the attention from the media and the bickering corporations and the “don’t blame us” Obama administration has been on just one leak. Well, now we learn what’s going on with leak number two - FAR MORE than BP or the U.S. government are willing to admit.

The truth is that as we stand right now, we’re in the worst-case scenario for this oil spill. That can mean only one thing: that the worst-case scenario BP and the U.S. government came up with was actually the best-case scenario. Now we have to start imagining of worster possibilities.

While I think Friedman was way too easy on Obama, his overall assessment was correct. This should be a moment that changes everything. Instead, it will not.

This is such a grievous disaster. I don’t really have a conclusion for this Portrait of Our Economic Meltdown, except to say that it’s so clear that big business and the U.S. government will not change. We people need to change. (And BTW, the way we change isn’t to vote incumbents out of office. We change by changing ourselves, not by changing politicians!) We need to live different lives, not dependent on big-business greed and government fixes.

Change, baby, change!

High Hopes for U.S. Economy

Some stats about U.S. finances were shared over at the 100 Thing Challenge Facebook today. It got me thinking of doing a little calculating of my own. Here's something to ponder.

$233 dollar bills stacked on top of each other = 1 inch. So...

$14,762,880 dollar bills stacked on top of each other = 1 mile.

I'll be trying to climb Mount Whitney in June. It's the continental U.S.'s highest mountain at 14,494 feet or about 2.74 miles high. Measured in dollar bills, Whitney is $40,597,920 dollar bills high.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the U.S. will save $143 billion dollars by 2019 because of the new healthcare legislation. That's 3,522 Mount Whitneys worth of dollar bills stacked on top of each other! Wow.

Er, uh, well the U.S. debt is currently $12.9 trillion dollars. How many Mount Whitneys worth of dollar bills would stack up next to the current U.S. debt?

Try 317,750! That is a lot of Mount Whitneys.

Here's another way to look at it. $143 billion dollar bills stacked up would be 9,686 miles, or about the distance of flying from San Diego to London and then back to Chicago.

$12.9 trillion dollar bills stacked up would be 812,849 miles. That's about the distance of flying from San Diego to the moon and then back to San Diego...and then back to the moon...and then back to San Diego.

We've got a long way to go...

Housing Our Attitudes About Money - Portraits of Our Economic Meltdown

If you did not catch it this morning on your commute to work, make sure you take eight minutes to listen to this story from NPR. The report both chastens American home owners and also offers hope. I'm designating it the next installment of Portraits of Our Economic Meltdown.

I think perhaps the most troubling comment in the story came from Mrs. Moore who said, "I look at it this way: You're sitting on a bank, so if you can use it, use it because you can't take it with you, so enjoy it while you can." The sad thing about her attitude is that she seems to have mostly used her "bank" -- the fake equity in her overvalued home -- for charitable expenditures. She used it to help her grandchildren and to pay for the funeral of a family member. I suspect there were other meaningful uses of the money she pulled out of her house.

Yet it wasn't really money she was using. And that was the trouble with the sub-prime mortgage debacle. It is the ongoing fiasco of the American economy. Whether to buy BWMs or to finance a college education, Americans are not using real money for their lifestyle purchases.

If, for example, a BMW is out of a person's price range and the person really really wants to own one, then the person needs to adjust her lifestyle to work toward that goal (questionable though the goal be). She needs to get a career that earns the kind of money necessary to responsible afford a fancy car. Instead, the usual route Americans take to the BMW dealership is a duel-income household, insufficient savings, and lots of credit card debt.

The high costs of a college education, as another example, is a sign of some systemic issues in the direction that higher education is going here in America. And yet, that does not mean that parents should expect to use fake bubble money to finance the education of their children. This is a recipe for parents leaving no inheritance and adding the burden of their financial care to their children.

The inevitability of owning up to the actual value of our homes and our other possessions is that we'll have to admit that we are, in material terms, worth less than we have come to believe. It seems like policy makers are avoiding that reckoning. Best that individual Americans don't make the same mistake.

New Commission on U.S. Debt

Yesterday President Obama created a bipartisan commission to address the ticking bomb of the United States' national debt. The co-chairs of the commission are former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and former chief of staff under President Clinton, Erskine Bowles.

I cannot recommend enough that you take seven minutes to listen to the NPR Melissa Block interview with Simpson and Bowles. Don't just read the article, make sure you listen to the audio, too. Go get em Simpson!

I'll be watching for the commission's website and news of its findings. We truly have a difficult road ahead of us in the United States when it comes to our fiscal situation. This is a do or die scenario, though. Either we get our finances in order or else generations suffer, bad.

Let me just add that the response of average folk like you and me should not be extreme. I heard Wendell Berry tell a joke once about a Kentuckian who was digging a huge hole. Another person came along and asked what he was digging it for, to which the first guy responded, "This is where I'm gonna put all the sons o' bitches." The second guy thought about it for a minute then asked, "So who's gonna bury 'em?"

We're all in this mess together -- you, me, our friends, bankers, politicians, and even radio talk show hosts. Virtues, beginning with humility and charity, are the tools we'll need to solve this problem.