Home » Posts tagged 'Personal Income'
Tag Archives: Personal Income
North Dakota’s Economy Has Been “Completely Devastated” By Oil’s Collapse
North Dakota’s Economy Has Been “Completely Devastated” By Oil’s Collapse
Yesterday, on the way to documenting the malaise China’s hard landing has inflicted on Minnesota’s mining country, we discussed the dramatic impact falling crude prices have had on the American and Canadian oil patches.
Take Texas, for instance, where a year of crude carnage has wreaked havoc upon what, until last year anyway, was the engine driving the “robust” US labor market. As we showed in November, layoffs in Lone Star land far outrun job losses in any other state. In Houston (which was already staring down a worsening pension crisis), vacant office space is “piling up.” As WSJ wrote last week, “the amount of sublease space on the market in the Houston area hit 7.6 million square feet, or the size of more than two Empire State Buildings.”
“The unemployment rate in Texas rose sharply to 9.2% in 1986, an all-time high for the state,” Goldman wrote recently, recalling a previous period of low oil prices in a note entitled “How Bad Can Texas Get?”
“Real house prices fell 30% peak to trough, and the number of bankruptcy filings (including both business and non-business filings) more than doubled from 1984 to 1986,” the bank added.
North of the border, things are even worse. As regular readers are no doubt aware, Alberta is a veritable nightmare as suicide rates rise, the number of jobless multiplies, food bank usage soars, and property crime in Calgary spikes.
“Lower for longer” has been a disaster for many state and local governments in the US, as revenue projections devised before oil’s historic plunge prove increasingly optimistic.
Take Louisiana for example, where Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne recently announced that the state is facing a $750 million deficit.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
America’s “Inevitable” Revolution & The Redistribution Fallacy
Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived.The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.
That’s NYPost.com’s Michael Goodwin’s chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,” a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.
To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.
Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”
He identifies two previous eras where a general consensus prevailed, and collapsed. Each lasted about as long as an individual’s lifetime, was dominated by a single political party and ended dramatically.
First came the era that stretched from 1800 until slavery and sectionalism led to the Civil War.
The second consensus, which he calls the capitalist-industrial era, lasted from the end of the Civil War until the Great Depression.
It is the third consensus, which grew out of the depression and World War II, which is now shattering. Because the nation is unable to solve economic stagnation, political dysfunction and the resulting public discontent, Piereson thinks the consensus “cannot be resurrected.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
