Drop Back Another Quarter Century

Similarities between the Great and Lesser Depressions are obvious: banking collapse, liquidity traps, and upper class twits moving confidently in the wrong direction.  But, the intransigence of the Very Serious People (as Paul Krugman calls the always wrong and never in doubt crowd) also echoes World War I.  Austerians have transformed economics into a trench warfare.  Middle-class and poor people are being ground to paste.  Their savings have been eradicated.  Their once most valuable assets are as worthless as Confederate bonds.  Higher education, long identified as the ticket for upward mobility, is a dead-end section of trench bottomed with quicksand.  

Comfortable generals in grand far away places exhort the hoi polloi to climb up and out of the trenches.  Stop being so damn lazy.  Be entrepreneurs.  Take risks.  Be like us!   You, too, can become self-made, rags-to-riches, Horatio Algers.  You only need the will and gumption to run successfully across mine fields, under concertina wire, and through machine gun fire.  Anyone can do it!  But, hush, the generals  keep secrets.  They know that only a few people will make it rich.  Most will end up exhausted and broken; either caught in the trenches or eviscerated in no mans' land.  The generals know because they planted the mines, unrolled the concertina wire, and hired the mercenaries manning the 100-shot-a-minute guns.