Connect ALL The Dots, Please

I hear and see and read about a lot of hand-wringing amongst those whose job is to evaluate and explain the state of the American economy to the rest of us. The latest cause célèbre is Starbucks' announcement that it's closing 600 of its coffee stores. The consensus among the hand-wringers is that this is yet another bad sign for the economy, as it's more evidence that Americans are cutting back on spending for non-essentials.

The hand-wringers also note that while companies selling things everyone must have, like food, are doing just fine, a lot of other stores are tanking. If I remember correctly, I even heard on NPR this morning that the Bombay Company, CompUSA, and others were going to close all their retail outlets. The hand-wringers used this fact to suggest that as availability of goods shrinks, people will buy less, and once people get "really scared," they'll start saving, which means even less money in retail circulation, which means even more shrinkage in the economy--a downward spiral the likes of which we haven't seen in this country since 1929.

What I want to know is why the last dot hasn't been connected, to wit: with stores going away, jobs are going away, and with jobs going away, income is going away, which means even more people will have even less to spend on necessities, let alone on the "nice-to-haves" that we think we need to live happy and fulfilling lives. Why aren't the hand-wringers expressing concern about what effect the loss of jobs, thus income, thus money, will have on the economy?

What's being ignored or lost in this whole discussion is what the loss of jobs does to the people losing them. Until we as a society make that connection, and until we as a society realize that businesses exist to serve people and not the other way around, we're never going to have long-term economic security again.

I suppose this development should not surprise me. It's a repeated motif throughout America's history. I had hoped we'd collectively learned enough from the Great Depression to avoid repeating it, but I was wrong. Yet again, we get the twin pies in the face: those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it . . . and those who learn the wrong lessons from history are doomed to suffer from their willful ignorance. What's really sad is that those of us who didn't make either mistake still have to suffer the consequences of the actions of those who made both.