Can Anything Reverse the Economy’s Decline?

We veer well off the beaten path with this week’s Question of the Week:  What could conceivably reverse the U.S. economy’s decline of the last 40 years?  Although I’d initially considered limiting the dialogue to optimistic points of view to stretch readers’ imaginations, a sunshine-and-lollipops requirement might prove to be a non-starter in this forum.  And so, if you truly believe that there is nothing you can think of that would reverse the implosion of America’s standard of living, feel free to vent your pessimism.

Implosion?  Some will argue that the very word overstates the problem – or that the problem doesn’t exist. They will point out that the stock market is trading at all-time highs, that their next-door neighbor just spent $40,000 on a kitchen remodel, that another recently took his family on an Alaskan cruise, and that a 60-inch TV is well within the reach of every family that wants one.

‘Shop Till You Drop’

Is America great, then, or what?  It depends. If your credo is “Shop till you drop!” then yes, one could argue that we are indeed living in the very best of times. But others, including your editor, would say that although the easy availability of “stuff” is arguably at a civilizational high, some non-material things that matter a great deal more to our well-being have receded beyond the reach of the broad middle class.  Consider the following:

• Private-sector workers are no longer able to save enough to retire at 65 if at all.
• Stay-at-home mothers have become a luxury that fewer and fewer households can afford.
• Even double-income families are having to borrow heavily to put the kids through college.
• New graduates face a bleak job market for which the degree skills they acquired are ill-suited.
• Retirees who held good jobs during their working lives are having to take minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet.
• Impressive as advances in medical technology might seem, we are no healthier than we were when doctors still made house calls.
• Public and private debt total at least $150 trillion, implying that our children, their children, and their children’s children will be working overtime just to pay the interest on that sum, never mind retiring the principal

Is there a way out of this rut?  I seriously doubt it. But if, for the sake of argument, I were to accept the premise that a bottom will eventually be reached, and then to imagine that “something” will lift the economy from its still-deepening trough, that “something” would come from America’s success in solving the world’s energy problems.  And although the holy grail of cold fusion may lie beyond even Yankee know-how, that is not to say that some other, inexhaustible source of clean energy cannot be found.

Self-Sufficient in Energy

In the meantime, our abundant supply of natural gas could make America self-sufficient in energy within the decade, providing a powerful boost to the manufacturing sector. Voila! We are back in the race, able to compete globally, and therefore to accumulate the savings we’ll need to overhaul and modernize industry.

And yes, I’m well aware of how easy it is to shoot down all of this. For starters, fracking may not produce nearly as much natural gas as proponents have claimed. And any factories we build that can compete with the low-wage likes of China, India, North Korea and Brazil may use so few workers that they would have little impact on unemployment that seems, with the Great Recession, to have become intractable.

But that is not the point of this exercise. If the U.S. economy is not headed into oblivion over the next 50 years, but rather toward a gradual or even dramatic improvement, how might that happen?