No, We Don’t Know Tough Times.
I was reading this New York Times article on how the media and we ourselves are making this recession seem a lot worse than it is when I ran across this perfect example of economic knuckleheadedness.
Media companies have been hammered on the leading edge of the recession because they run on advertising, a discretionary expenditure that always is among the first things to go. Viacom had third-quarter earnings of over $400 million in 2008, down 37 percent compared with the same quarter last year, but it was still nicely profitable. Nonetheless, the company laid off 850 people.
Michelle Rabinowitz, a producer at MTV News, was one of them. A Web and pop-cult savvy journalist who has covered everything from Britney Spears to the shootings at Virginia Tech, she is, at 28, just the kind of talent media companies fought over in the last couple of years and will again in the future. But for now, they’re dumping bodies off the back of the truck.
“A lot of young people had to find jobs after 9/11, so we know about tough times, but at least we know what that was about,” she said. “I go outside and the sky is not falling, but my job is not there, the value of the apartment that I bought is not there, my 401(k) is not there. It’s weird, it’s like somebody made a bad decision somewhere — the Federal Reserve, a media company, an executive, who knows? Everything sort of looks the same, but everything has changed.”
[Emphasis Mine]
I’m sorry that Ms. Rabinowitz lost her job, but that’s just silly. Her generation knows nothing about “tough times”. Nor does mine. It took a year for unemployment in this country to break six percent after 9/11. By no reasonable measure was that “tough”.
Take a look at this graphical representation of unemployment numbers, month by month, going back to 1949. Take a look at 1975-1977, the early 1980s or 1992-1993. Or look by year and see just how amazingly good the last few years have been compared to the very recent past.
I don’t know for sure how old Ms. Rabinowitz is, but based on this biography, I’m going to guess that she’s somewhere under 30 years old and, if she started working right out of high school like most young folks my age did, she’s been working since about 1995. That means that she’s never even seen an unemployment rate above 6 percent in her entire working life and only once has she seen inflation above 3.25 percent. Ms. Rabinowitz has spent her adult life working in one of the most prosperous times in our country since the Roaring 20s.
She doesn’t know tough times and neither do we. We need to calm the heck down and get some perspective on what is happening around us. Indeed, things could be better, but they can always be better. Yes, unemployment is rising, but we’re nowhere near the point of panic. Things are only going to get really bad if we lose our heads do something stupid like turn our economy over to those who have built our government into a continually-failing behemoth.
Other Posts of Interest:
- McCain and Obama Are Ignoring the Elephant in the Room
- Aren’t You Nice for Paying Keith Olbermann’s Salary?
- Economic Rules? What on Earth are Those?
Category: The Economy and Your Money, The Rise of the Nanny State
The Left has been singing about a recession for the last 8 years, broken clock, blind squirrel or self fulfilled prophecy?
I agree that we should not run around screaming The Sky is Falling. Part of a good plan would be to monitor the numbers and be on the safe side by preparing in case it does. Thats what I didn't do and I have been laid off 3 times in two past decades including now and it's looking bad. We need to prepare and here along with
http://moneystight.blogtoolkit.com are good places for us to help each other and those that the sky has already fallen on. If we stick together and prepare we can keep it from falling on us further.