An economic myth

I was listening to Fritz Pfister on WMAY this morning. He has several times blamed the recession on the government regulation and taxation. This is a standard mantra of right-wing anti-government conservatives who miss the good old days of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and the great Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

The recession is the result of supressed wages and increased prices over the years, remedied by easy access to credit cards, sub-prime adjustible rate mortgage loans falsified by unscrupulous lenders.

The minimum payments on credit cards finally became larger than the low income "middle class" could handle. People just can't buy any more on credit. The reality of their (our) income finally hit a wall.

But get this. The wall would have come into view much later if a Republican was elected. Instead, businesses punished their employees for voting for Barack Obama. The massive layoffs began right after the election.

Now the right-wingers are blaming government again, because businesses don't have consumers. Businesses don't have consumers because they overprice their products (based on a now extinct credit-liquid economy) rather than pricing their products based on a real income (without credit) economy.

It's the "free" market's own fault for allowing itself to be structured around an unsustainable credit-supported economy.