John E. Riutta
It’s pretty simple really. When people don’t have jobs they spend less. When they spend less, businesses sell less. If businesses sell less, they reduce how much they produce. If they are producing less, the don’t need as many people working for them so they lay off staff and don’t hire. And if they lay off staff and don’t hire, people don’t have jobs. If there was ever the perfect example of a vicious circle, you’d be hard pressed to find one more vicious than this.
This past Thursday, August 11th, 2011, I received a $251.00 citation for speeding. According to the citation, at 5:07 PM, I was doing 45 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone along a major thoroughfare in southeast Portland, Oregon. The only problem is that at no time during the entirety of Thursday, August 11th, 2011 was I within twenty miles of the location indicated on the citation, nor was I there the day before that, or the day before that.
Regular readers of this column will no doubt recall that I have on many previous occasions written about how I wish the United States could take a few tips from some of our European allies and become just a bit more like them. However whenever I’ve written such things I had in mind the food of France, the literature of England, or the cinema of Germany – not the credit rating of Belgium.
Continue Reading →The other day, after reading and hearing far too much about the shenanigans in our nation’s capital, I found myself out behind our house with a knife in one hand and a stick in the other. Now before you think that I had picked up these items in preparation for a very poorly equipped insurrection, I should tell you that I was simply doing something that I hadn’t done for years. I was whittling on a stick.
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