Ben Stein is a Dick

A tiny dick, to be sure. Here's what Ben has to say about the unemployed:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along—not always easy.

Sounds exactly like a faux-economist who got fired from the NY Times for being the spokesman for a questionable credit report company.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Geithner Sure Plays A Mean Round Ball

If Timmy was half as good when it comes to monetary policy, maybe we'd have financial reform and unemployment below 7%. He might be good shooting from the outside, but the team wins or loses based on the bruising inside game.

Cutting the Deficit

Suddenly, everyone is a deficit hawk. It's mostly those who supported the last administration's budgetary strategy of cutting taxes for the rich and spending tons of cash for wars and things, but nearly everyone agrees that lowering our debt load is crucial to sustained economic growth.

Perhaps we could just pay back China with slugs coated in lead.

Kevin Drum points to one of the common disconnects encountered when people are asked to provide areas where spending reductions make sense. As it turns out, everyone wants to cut expenditures, but few are willing to pull the financial trigger.

Drum:

As you can see, there wasn't one single area that even a third of the country wanted to cut back on. Except — hold on there! Down in the middle of the table. There is one area that everyone's willing to trim: foreign aid. Good 'ol foreign aid. A category that, as Roger McShane dryly points out, "makes up less than 1% of America's total spending."

Beyond that, there were only four areas that even a quarter of the population is willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.

Where are the tea baggers when you need them?

Forbes: What Top US Companies Paid In Taxes

The short answer is not very freaking much.

For example, last year ExxonMobil had sales of $311 billion, pretax income of $35 billion, but paid no US income taxes - none. It helps to have a bunch of "wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Or General Electric:

Sales: $157 billion
Pretax income: $10.3 billion
Income taxes: (-$1.1 billion)
Tax rate: N/A
GE's financial services unit, GE Capital, keeps the overall tax bill so low. Over the last two years, GE Capital has displayed an uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the U.S. and make lots of money overseas, where tax rates are lower.

This is nothing new, of course. But I'm still waiting to see Tea Party protests outside of corporate offices, since these American companies obviously hate America enough to deprive it of tax income that could be used to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, fund health care, and eliminate the budget surplus, with money to spare.

I'm guessing the Tea Party is waiting for Fox News to light the outrage lamp.

American Ribbons of Shame

One measure of how low America has sunk is that 49 million of its citizens lacked consistent access to adequate food during the Bush administration.

That's a staggering figure, one seemingly too large for even cold-hearted conservatives to sweep under the rug. But they're trying.

Where's the outrage?

Outlined in Household Food Security in the United States, 2008 (warning - pdf), the Food and Drug Administration report outlines the kind of issues we're dealing with here: Food scarcity for 7-8 months of the year, for several days each month.

Does anyone reading this even know what that would be like? Have you ever gone a day or so without knowing from where your next meal would come?

I haven't - not in my entire 48 years. And I've been through some lean times where packaged ramen noodles, generic mac and cheese, or spaghetti with watery tomato sauce was the repas du jour. But I always knew I had something in the pantry.

I don't understand how, with million dollar bonuses being handed out like Halloween candy and executives floating gently to earth while harnessed to exorbitant golden parachutes, we can sanction 49 million of our fellow villagers living in a constant state of sustenance anxiety.

When did we lose our humanity?

The America I'm observing thousands of people waiting in line for hours wherever an organization spins up a volunteer clinic to provide free medical and dental care. At one such clinic in New Orleans this month, four mortals were immediately taken to the hospital due to the severity of their conditions.

22% of Louisiana's population is not covered by medical insurance. That hasn't stopped Governor Bobby Jindal from attacking the health care reform bill passed by the US House or the pending Senate legislation. Nor has it kept Jindal from traveling out of Louisiana several times in the past week for fundraising purposes.

Keeping constituents from dying or raising cash for re-election? It appears Jindal has made his choice.

Little Rock, Arkansas held a clinic this week for 1300 uninsured citizens to receive free health screenings. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D) has opposed the public option offered by the House and Senate bills, and Republicans are lining up candidates to challenge her for re-election, certain to use her HCR vote as a wedge issue. Lincoln desperately wants to keep her job, and the vast majority of the state's 473,000 uninsured residents would be eligible for for federal assistance under the Senate proposal.

It seems like this should be a much simpler decision for Lincoln. She could help make a difference in the lives of nearly a half-million Arkansas residents. Or she could focus on remaining in the Senate - two positions which, believe it or not, are not necessarily in conflict.

The US unemployment rates stands at 10.2%. It was 4.4% in May 2007. The broader U-6 unemployment rate, including those who have stopped looking for work or who can't find a job, stands at 17.5%.

When it comes to wealth distribution, roughly 10% of the US population owns 71% of all US wealth. The top 1% controls nearly 38%, while the bottom 40% owns approximately 1%. The level of wealth inequality has almost doubled since 1975.

Does the 10% of the population with the most wealth have health insurance and a stable food supply? Probably so. As do members of Congress, state legislators, governors, lobbyists...

When did we lose our humanity? Evidence suggests the loss began accelerating in the mid-1970s.

Can we regain it?

I'm not confident. History demonstrates few instances where the haves accepted less so the have-nots might have some without legal mandate. One look around the teabagger circuit and Sarah Palin's book tour should provide insight into the support for wealth redistribution. As Matt Taibbi notes, Palin has done a masterful job of connecting with the "pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America."

If Bill and Melinda Gates can donate $3.35 billion, and Warren Buffet can spare $37 billion, there's no reason why the top 10% can't cough off a little dough to make sure everyone eats and no one dies due to poor or nonexistent medical care.

It's time for the "richest country in the world" to take care of their own.

Philly Free Library System Is Kaput

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has the sad news - the Philadelphia Free Library System is out of money, and it's being shut down. All of it.

This includes "all branch and regional library programs, programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults" and "all children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs" and "all library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers" and "all community meetings" and "all GED, ABE and ESL program."

That's just lousy. I can't think of many entities that give broader access to information resources at a lower cost than libraries, especially for segments of our population that often have scant resources available in the first place.

Doctorow sums it up nicely:

Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker's bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region's connection with human culture and knowledge and community.

Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.

The Bush Terms: Numbers Mean Things

Marc Ambinder sums it up nicely:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

Can Young Workers Get Health Care?

Here's a Catch-22 for you - younger workers tend to lower overall health insurance costs because they are generally healthier and use less in the way of benefits than they pay in to the system via premiums. It's the oldsters like me that are a drain. So you would think insurers would want to load up on the young-ens, actuarially speaking, to help shore up that profit canopy.

A recent report sanctioned by the AFL-CIO demonstrates that not only are insurers not adding twenty-somethings to their roles, but the number of young working people covered by insurance is dropping like a stone.

Young Workers: A Lost Decade provide a glimpse into a startling fact:

31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.

The survey is a stunning expose of the economic situation faced by young workers today. As a parent of a daughter who just graduated from college this past June, I'm well aware of the pressure she faces by being underemployed and without health insurance coverage for the first time since the blinding lights of the delivery room hit her in the face. She cried then, too.

More and more young workers are unable to pay their bills, have taken to living with their parents, and have put off further educational development due to the cost. This can't possibly be good for the future of America.

Is it simply the profit-sucking vermin at the top of the corporate ladder skimming off a larger share, leaving less to spread around to workers, especially those new to the workforce? Could it be that younger workers grew up in a period of affluence and consumerism that has now proven to be unsustainable, and they therefore need to recalibrate their expectations and begin the tough journey many of us have faced - living within our means?

It's conceivable that my adult children could be the first generation in 100 years that doesn't outperform their parents economically, a frightening thought indeed. Let's hope that these factors and more cause young people to get engaged in the governing process and begin to vote as a larger percentage of the eligible electorate.

Is joining a union the way to go? I'm not so sure - there's some systemic change needed to unionization in this country to avoid financial collapses like we've seen in the automotive industry. Unions can certainly be part of the solution, along with sensible regulation, responsible management, and better financial acumen on behalf of younger workers.

But these items are not separate and distinct from each other. They are seamlessly linked, and the failure of any segment to keep their agreement puts significant pressure on the others, pressure that can deflate many balloons, as we've seen.

Where Are The Stimulus Jobs?

There's a lot of gum-flapping going on in Republican circles about how slowly the jobless numbers are rebounding. Not that they have a plan, of course, but that never stops them from pontificating about that which they themselves cannot solve.

Derek Thompson, via Andrew Sullivan, points to this chart and make an interesting observation:

The best explanation I've found for why the stimulus didn't work is this graph from the GAO analysis of the stimulus act. It shows pretty clearly that the 76 percent of stimulus spending through the first four months went to fill in the gaping holes in Medicaid and state budgets. In other words, the stimulus isn't acting like a pole vault lifting job creation above the baseline. It's been acting like a crutch to keep state budgets and payrolls from imploding.

How Are The Rich Doing?

In his Mother Jones blog, Kevin Drum checks in to see how the rich are doing in these tough times. Turns out that things are going pretty well.

Drum pulls some data from a Wall Street Journal article that shows exactly how wealth continues to be socked away by an increasingly smaller group of people.

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S.....In the five years ending in 2007, earnings for American workers rose 24%, half the 48% gain for the top-paid. The result: The top-paid represent 33% of the total, up from 28% in 2002.

Think about that - 33% of the total of all pay in the U.S. That doesn't leave much for everyone else, does it?

Keep in mind that Americans only owe payroll taxes on income up to $106,000, so while the rest of us are paying our fair share, the top-paid max out early on and contribute no payroll taxes on their extra accumulated income.

Tell me again what a socialist Obama is for wanting the top 1 1/2% to help fund health care reform with some additional taxation, and try to do it without using the term "robber-barons" to describe those raking in 1/3 of all pay in this country.

Image by jvstin via flickr

Infuriating Rich People Are Better Than You

Let me begin by telling you a true story from my city.

My neighbor was explaining that some former residents of the neighborhood had moved on up to a much bigger house for their family of three, and they needed a plumber to put in a water supply to their new wet bar.

The neighbor recommended a good plumber who had installed an outdoor faucet for him previously, so the former residents decided to give him this plumber a whirl.

In the last year or so, the plumber had gone through a divorce, then lost his house as part of the breakup. He had hit a tough stretch, was living with his mother, and labored 10-12 hours per day to keep his head above water.

So the plumber shows up to install the water supply and notices that the homeowners lead a pretty luxurious existence. They are also very detailed and fussy about everything, providing excruciating detail about what they wanted, how they wanted it, tossing in their own ideas - just the thing that an expert working in a vocational trade like plumbing wants to hear.

The final straw was when the plumber was in the finished basement and they warned him not to make a mess on their newly installed dance floor.

They have a dance floor.

I admire the plumber's restraint. All he did was vent to my neighbor that he's working 12 hours a day to pull himself out of a crappy situation, and these folks have their own dance floor.

I thought this would be a good preamble to an article posted at Gawker concerning Peter and Billy Getty, heirs to the Getty Oil fortune, who have been deemed blog-worthy by the San Francisco Chronicle.

What's the blog's genre? What it's like to be rich.

Oh, yes. Begin heating up the tar and feathers.

Here's a little taste for you - get to know Peter Getty.

Since graduating from college in 1988, Peter Getty has flirted occasionally with real work, but finding it wearisome, has returned full time to his first love, watching television.

Not to be confused with serious responsibilities are Mr. Getty's infrequent forays into music and writing, nor is the obscure music blog he has kept pseudonymously for the past several years.

Make sure you add this blog, What The Butler Didn't See, to your feed reader. It will be perfect for those days when your blood pressure is running a little too low and needs a boost.

Can Behavioral Economics Save Us?

NPR had a fascinating segment today on All Things Considered concerning the use of psychology to save your from yourself (generally) and applying this approach to economics (specifically) in a manner that makes a lot of sense.

It should come as no surprise that we humans don't do a very good job at analysis and decision making due to all sorts of biases and brain farts. Even when faced with evidence that our decisions are terrible, we'll continue to support our own conclusions.

For example, we tend to seek out data that supports our views while avoiding information that challenges them. That's confirmation bias and it clouds our ability to think clearly and rationally. Think of it this way - how many people watch both FOX News and MSNBC?

Anyway, a growing number of people working in the Obama administration are believers of psychological research as a basis for economic thought, or as NPR points out:

"...the human animal is hard-wired to make errors when it comes to decision-making, and therefore people need a little "nudge" to make decisions that are in their own best interests."

The NPR story delves into the genesis of behavioral economics and it's no surprise that economists are clucking while dismissing the whole thing as mumbo-jumbo. Conservatives use the topic to point out yet another way for government to insert itself into personal choice and liberty.

I think I'm on the side of behavioral economics on this one, folks. The examples make sense to me, and there have been numerous failings of previously-sacred economic models of late.

Even if fancy computers parse the data and crunch the numbers, people design the codes and algorithms that make up the models. Human psychology has to play a role.

Some of the concepts put forth in the NPR story are familiar to me, as I'm in the middle of reading The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner. "Anchoring bias" is one of them:

For instance, Kahneman and Tversky identified "anchoring bias." It turns out that whenever you are exposed to a number, you are influenced by that number whether you intend to be influenced or not.

Credit card companies count on this bias when they suggest a very low minimum payment on your bill. We tend to make a decision on how much to pay based on using that very figure as a point of reference.

Humans are nothing if not erratic and irrational, and we seem to be able to accept that in nearly every facet of our lives. Why not economics?

For those who worry that "nudges" are another word for expansion of government reach, consider this passage:

But Thaler argues that government policymakers don't need to be hyper-rational to help people make better choices.

He offers this example: Any American who goes to London realizes that they are endangering their lives every time they try to cross the street, because the traffic comes from the wrong direction.

Our instinct is to look left, but if you look left, you'll get run over by a double-decker bus. To help us, Thaler says, someone in the British government decided to write on the sidewalks of busy intersections filled with American tourists the words "look right."

"British bureaucrats are no smarter than American bureaucrats," says Thaler, "but they know that tourists tend to look the wrong way and could use a helpful nudge to avoid getting hit by a truck."

As I look around at our current economic situation and see the millions that have been flattened by a collapse that no economist predicted, I can't help but think that anything that keeps us from being hit by the next truck is truly welcome.

Unless economists have a better idea?

Using Psychology to Save You from Yourself , via NPR

Free Viagra Helps Jobless Rise and Shine

Becoming unemployed can be crippling to a person's self-esteem, especially for those who consider their jobs to be a large part of who they are as a person.

Worse yet, some men have a large stake in being able to achieve (and maintain) an erection, as it serves as a symbolic demonstration of their worthiness and vitality.

If you're out of work and limp-noodled, help is on the way.

Pfizer has committed to giving away some of their most popular medications, including Viagra, to the unemployed. If you lost your job since January 1, and were taking a Pfizer med for at least three months prior, you could qualify for free prescriptions for up to a year.

I'm sure this has very little to do with Pfizer looking to garner goodwill with the Obama administration to help ensure they don't get rogered as a result of the upcoming health care task force.

Free Lipitor, Viagra, 70 other drugs for jobless, via The Huffington Post

The Decline in Lending

In this Mother Jones blog, Kevin Drum has a good look at the true state of lending in the US. The image presented is not all that comforting.

Using Treasury Department data, the Wall Street Journal did an analysis demonstrating that the biggest recipients of taxpayer aid saw a whopping 23% drop in lending between October 2008, when TARP kicked off, and February 2009.

I suppose one could expect a drop off of lending in a crappy economy, but 23%. Yikes.

Chart of the Day - 4.20.2009

How Deception is Hurting America

Investor's Business Daily is not a publication that I peruse on a regular basis. Perhaps I don't meet their demographic - I invest, but not every day, and I certainly don't track my portfolio with any sort of rigor.

It's been atypical for a business or investment-focused media source to be blunt and truthful about many of the things that have led America to the brink, financially, socially, and philosophically. And when I started to read an article by Walter E. Williams on how deception is the root cause of America's ills, for a moment I believed someone was about to speak the truth to power.

I shouldn't have been so optimistic.

Williams essentially blames government in general, and Congress specifically, for what he deems wholesale dishonesty in dealing with issues such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then takes the usual conservative jump to rail against healthcare reform and plea once again for his rich compatriots to opt out of social security.

How stupid is it of us to ask those who brought us "affordable" housing to now turn their attention to bringing us "affordable" health care?

I seem to remember all sort of bankers and brokers and traders and investors making tons of profit off of loans made to people who couldn't afford them or shouldn't have qualified for them, driving up home values to such lofty heights that foreclosure homes are being abandoned by banks because it's cheaper to walk away from the properties than to try and sell them.

I also recall brokers and dealers leveraging credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations to extreme ratios, which is partially to blame for the collapse of many financial firms and the pasting folks like me took in our investments.

Where's the accountability, Mr. Williams, in your investor community for what they've done? You didn't seem to have a problem with government when they were relaxing regulation at your request, and it would be a neck-and-neck race between the investment community and Congress to see who might win a deception race.

I think I'm going to set up non-profit and begin to raise money to help out Mr. Williams and his cronies. With the funds I collect, I'll stimulate the economy by going to Target and making a large purchase that I'll distribute to him and his readers.

There's apparently a lack of mirrors in the investor community. That's the only reason I can think of as to why they don't spend any time looking into them.

Won't you please give to the Look In The Mirror Fund?

Deception Is Root Cause of America's Ills

Where Would Tea Baggers Cut The Budget?

One of the funniest things about watching the antics of the FOX News driven and rich-folk-funded Tea Bagger revolt develop has been trying to figure out what the hell their message is, since it seems to change from hour to hour.

I get that they are fed up with government bailouts and stimulus packages. I don't think any of us is thrilled about pouring billions into banks that give us the finger while we're doing it, but it seems like a better option than financial Armageddon.

Similarly, there's a lot of money being spent to build roads and bridges, but nearly every economist agrees that when the economy is in terrible shape, only the government can pump the kind of money into the system to get things back on track, and at least we're spending on things that will be around in twenty years.

What bothers me about the tea bagging crowd is that they are very vocal about what they are against, but nearly silent on what they are for. Ok, you tea-bagging bastards...you don't like government spending? Tell me what you would cut.

Here's a graphic provided by Kevin Drum in his MotherJones blog that details where most of the federal dollars are spent. Are you going to cut Social Security? Defense spending? Medicare and Medicaid?

No? That only leaves 11% of the total budget left to trim. Are you really going to make a big difference by paring 15% off of the paltry 2% currently devoted to education? Not a big cost savings there. I'm sure that the federal retirees and veterans would like to hear how they can make do with less.

So put the friggin' tea bags down and get serious. Tell us where you would make budget cuts, or sit down and shut up. Unless you truly have no idea of the real reasons why you are protesting.

Hey Paul Krugman

Hey Paul Krugman,
Why aren’t you in the administration?
Is there some kind of politicking that I don’t understand?
I mean, Timothy Geithner is like some little weasel.
Wasn’t he in a position of power
when all this sh*t went down in the first place?

When I listen to you, things seem to make sense
When I listen to him, all I hear is blah, blah, blah.

Hey Paul Krugman,
where the hell are ya, man?
‘Cause we need you on the front lines
not just writing for The New York Times.
I’d feel better if you were calling some shots
instead of writing your blog and probably thinking a lot.

I mean, don’t you have some influence?
Why aren’t you secretary of the Treasury?

For God’s sake, man, you won the Nobel Prize.
Timothy Geithner uses TurboTax.

When I listen to you, things seem to make sense.
When I listen to him, all I hear is blah, blah, blah.

Hey Paul Krugman, where the hell are ya, man?
(Obama Breakdown)

Sing it with me!

When I listen to you, things seem to make sense.
When I listen to him, all I hear is blah, blah, blah.

Hey Paul Krugman, where the hell are ya, man?
Your country needs you now.

Cliff Clavin Weeps

The United States Postal Service has announced that their business model has lost its zip and a large percentage of workers will soon be shipped bulk rate into retirement.

Somewhere in imaginary television Boston, Cliff Clavin weeps.

The pseudo-governmental agency has lifted its head out of the sand long enough to realize that electronic media, email, online bill payment, and other paperless activities are here to stay, leaving the USPS with an outdated and rapidly irrelevant business model.

Going from a $1.4 billion surplus in 2005 to a budget shortfall of $2.8 billion in 2008, one would think there must have been some way this agency was connected to the Bush administration, or at least shared the same accountants. However, it appears that this was entirely within the scope of issues the USPS should have been thinking about but didn't.

Current plans are to offer 150,000 postal employees "early retirement", although it's not known if this includes a payout to get these folks to leave voluntarily. Officials from postal unions are keeping a keen eye on whether there would be severance pay as part of any "retirement" activity.

A 15% management cut is also planned, which seems a bit light, given that the USPS registered roughly 765,000 employees at the end of 2008. If headcount drops to 600,000 or so, that's about a 20% reduction in force, and given that management typically has higher salary and compensation packages, one could surmise that management should share equally in the reductions, and there could be a case made that in order to keep service levels intact, more worker bees and less supervisors might be a better long-term solution.

Several fee increases in the last several years have not been enough to compensate for the plummeting numbers of pieces needing mailed, and the USPS is contemplating moving to a five-day per week delivery schedule, dropping Saturday delivery to cut costs.

Since it's either bills that I'd be willing to wait to receive or bulk rate advertisements that go from my mailbox directly to the recycling bin, changing the number of delivery days seems like a reasonable measure.

I'm assuming here that the local post office will still be open on Saturday, because people have gotten used to standing in long Saturday morning lines to mail packages and buy "forever" stamps from the one person working the counter while twenty other people walk out from the back room, look around, then walk back to whatever they were doing behind that damned partition. I know you're back there! I can see you!

So raise a glass with Cliff Clavin and toast the end of a postal era. Y'know, it's a little known fact....

Four Bear Markets

This should give you a good idea of how terrible the current market is in relation to others. Click the image to make it larger for easy viewing.

The Grinch That Stole Christmas Sales

Do you remember that scene in the animated holiday classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas, where the poor little dog Max is alternating between being hilarious and acting as a poster child for PETA as he attempts to pull the over-laden sled up the steep slopes of snow covered mountains?

At one point Max teeters precariously on the edge of a cliff, and it looks as if he will plummet to his death in some cavernous winter wonderland. Perfect children's fare.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that retailers weren't as lucky as Max. Holiday retail sales plunged 5.5% in November and fell an amazing 8% in November in what some experts are calling  the worst holiday shopping seasons on record.

Considering that early discounting was the response from most retailers, the impact to margins and P&L statements will be even more severe, as many goods were sold at break-even levels or lower. Even the purchase of gift cards was affected, which might curtail some of the post-holiday spending, terrible news for shops that count gift card sales at redemption, not at purchase. Heavy discounting prior to Dec. 25 also makes post-holiday sales less attractive, leading to the possibility of even more radical pricing strategies as merchants attempt to move sluggish inventory to generate cash flow and to support spring margins to buy.

Much hand-wringing by the industry is to be expected, as the retail community is somewhere near the Mendoza line in their performance this past year. While heaps of scorn for automakers and dealerships are evident, there's yet to be much public blame assigned to the retail supply chain, whose failure to anticipate a slowing consumer spending pattern as part of the overall economic slowdown is of epic proportions.

Of course, experts and retail management will quibble, their defense sure to include things like lead time needed for buys to be delivered for holiday marketing campaigns and how things weren't quite this terrible back when the purchasing and ad campaigns were implemented. That's letting them off the hook.

The ability to forecast consumer spending habits, and to make key determinations as to what the customer will want to buy and how much they will want to spend, is the crystal ball that separates successful retailers from the rest of the pack. In my many years in retail, the common explanations from management whenever sales failed to meet forecast or fell below l/y weather (it was bad, so no one could come out to shop, or it was good, so people were doing things other than shopping), the calendar (we had huge sales this weekend last year), and of course, the economy (no one has jobs to they can't afford our 27 SKUs of Dolby surround sound 5.1 DVD players with progressive scan). 

It's slightly amusing that these same merchants who've made millions thought the concept of false scarcity, with rabid crowds sleeping in the parking lot to be first in line to trample their neighbors in their quest for small quantities of discounted are now suffering the fate of actual abundance, as consumers aren't buying and stockpiles of unmoved goods hang as a profit-killing albatross around the necks of retail executives, who are doing the only thing they know - slashing prices and cutting heads, their eyes on the weekly and monthly numbers rather than on the horizon.