Then there are lots of bad boys and girls who lied about the financial health of their big companies and big banks and big institutions. They made these companies look like good investments to stockholders. In fact, they were houses of cards, totally dependent on being able to get more and more debt just to meet the demands of the debt they already had. They were paying interest to lenders, dividends to investors and payrolls and gigantic bonuses to their executives with the money they were borrowing or taking in from new lenders and investors. They were all Bernie Madoff’s, but they dressed up their Ponzi schemes with automobile factories or insurance companies in glittering high-rise buildings or banks with their names on stadiums. They were assisted by other bad boys and girls – sometimes called “criminal conspirators” – like those in Congress who got lots of money from them and looked the other way while they ran their schemes, or the regulators who didn’t bother enforcing regulations. Did Santa give them all orange jumpsuits and lumps of coal for Christmas? No. He gave them $700-billion dollars, and with a wink and a nod and a cheery “Ho-ho-ho,” he let it be known there’s a lot more where that came from.
But what of all the good little boys and girls who work very hard running their own small businesses or who have built up mid-sized companies, and pay their bills, and pay their taxes, and have real income – not just debt and mountainous losses? What gifts did they get? Just lumps of coal.
And that’s the secret reason – the reason the media, in all its coverage of job losses, never talks about – that all these jobs are disappearing.
It’s not just “the economy” or the recession or sagging consumer spending that are costing jobs. The secret reason is that all the good little boys and girls running all those small businesses and small companies that provide most of the jobs are mad at only getting lumps of coal while failures, liars, criminals, stupid and slothful deadbeats get gifts. So they are giving themselves gifts and handing out their own lumps of coal. They are closing their least profitable shops, eliminating their least profitable services, even firing their least profitable customers. They’re cutting size, cutting hours, cutting back, thus eliminating some of their biggest expense – payroll – and keeping that money for themselves. They are deliberately shrinking their businesses.
And just as fast as the evil Santa creates new gifts for the undeserving, they will keep shrinking the most necessary job-providing foundation of the economy, so the economy itself will keep shrinking. Santa’s stimulus will all disappear into bottomless sinkholes, no matter how much money the elves print. It was, after all, dumb debt that got us into this mess. More dumb debt won’t get us out.
Ho, ho, ho. Who’s the joke on? Everybody.