Feb 10 2009
How to Survive Economic Disaster — or At Least Try
Watching President Obama, I’m always struck by how calm and sure of himself he seems. Tonight’s press conference was no different. He said the recession has left the nation so weak that only the federal government can “jolt our economy back to life.”
“And he declared that failure to act swiftly and boldly “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”
He said the country could be in better shape by next year, as measured by increased hiring, lending, home values and other factors. “If we get things right, then, starting next year, we can start seeing significant improvement,” Obama said. With more than 11 million Americans now out of work, Obama defended his program against Republican criticism that it is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will not create jobs.
“The plan is not perfect,” the president said. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.”
Let’s pretend for a minute that this stimulus package passes (and isn’t completely gutted, which might still happen). What if President Obama is wrong and this package doesn’t do enough to create jobs even if it does pass? Paul Krugman of the New York Times thinks this bill won’t go nearly far enough and he is dismal about the prospects for our economy if it doesn’t. From his blog yesterday:
“Because what’s coming out of the current deliberations is really, really inadequate. I’ve gone through the CBO numbers a bit more carefully; they’re projecting a $2.9 trillion shortfall over the next three years. There’s just no way $780 billion, much of it used unproductively, will do the job.”
Two-point-nine-trillion-dollars is a lot of shortfall. Since no one knows for sure what will happen, and since it sounds kinda bad so far, let’s also pretend that the stimulus bill doesn’t work and that we go into severe, worsening recession, maybe even a “Depression”.
Rather than worry about civil unrest, riots, societal breakdowns, etc., (which we have no serious reason to assume will happen because they didn’t happen the other 3 times this happened) everyone could instead be thinking of ways to protect themselves and you know, survive. By that I mean you can take some tips from Dmitri Orlov (below) and you can also take responsibility for yourself and learn what it will take to get through the worst of economic times. Do you live in a house you can barely afford? You should sell it and move. Do you have bills that are too high? Drop some things like cable TV. Do you drive a big car? Park it and ride your bike. Things like that can train you to get used to less, because we might all have to do that at some point in the near future.
