HOUSING BUBBLE?

Housing Bubble? I don't think so. As much as this little phrase has spun out across the country as the source of all our money woes, it is not true. This is the sequence of events:

1. Intelligent people believed that corporations would self-regulate. Is it impolite to laugh now? Instead companies began the quest of squeezing ever more profit out of businesses. They began laying off hundreds of thousand people beginning in the early '80's and before. A reasonable white-collar work week was 37 hours in 1970. Now people do the jobs of 2 and 3 others. And regulating slid off a well-planned track.
2. Lobbyists became ever more prevalent on Capitol Hill until Representatives and Senators found themselves swimming with the sharks, particularly the special interests species. It was exhilarating. Our representatives felt cossetted by the attention. But they forgot two things. First sharks can turn on you in a second and with disastrous consequences. Second our elected officials were supposed to be swimming over here with the myriad of fish that we are. I can see how it happened. Who wants to say they work for fish? But they do.
3. Then NAFTA was born and soon began to make that sucking sound Ross Perot told us would pull our jobs south of the border. He was right. Over the past 8 years, we have seen manufacturing, customer service, and even IT head off shore. Then employers realized that it was a buyers market. They could lower the going rate for all jobs.
4. Nearly everything we consume from food to footballs is now, "Made in China", or "Proudly distributed in Wherever City and Whatever State". Translation: Made in China. We learned about the terrible manufacturing processes that killed our pets and killed China's babies. Quality Control of imports is essentially nonexistent.
5. Gasoline shot up to over $4 a gallon, which jump-started a rip tide of price increases. A package of cookies costs more than $5.00. Coffee is $12+. And the increases bleed into all other manufactured items.
6. Nearly 7 years ago, a friend was layed off from a Fortune 100 company. He had been a mid-manager in IT, but after looking for a job 2 years and losing their home, he finally got a job - in Iraq.
7. No jobs. No purchases. It doesn't take a genius.
8. People used credit cards and home equity to get along. But those two wells eventually dried up. We aren't in this money mess because people used their credit cards too much or bought houses they could ill afford. Nonsense! High credit cards and foreclosures are not the problem. It wasn't a housing bubble. Don't blame the symptom of the disease. Name the real source of the economic problem.