"If the next year is going to bring exceptional growth," [UCLA Anderson Forecast director Edward] Leamer writes, "consumers will need to express their optimism in the way that really counts — buying homes and cars. And that is not going to happen if businesses continue to express their pessimism in the way that really counts — by not hiring workers."

The result is an economic Catch-22.

That, in a nutshell, is the scenario that I believe has been slowly unfolding for some time. The thing that people don't seem to realize is that the Catch-22 is not neutral, i.e., it doesn't represent treading water. It is downward. You can reverse the polarity and get the same result: if businesses keep laying people off, people won't have money to spend, so businesses will turn to lay-offs.

Corporation have relied on job-destruction to cover-up a decades long failure to innovate and create the future. Throwing almost all our R&D money into war research for the last 70 years hasn't helped either.

This only ends when the government opens employment offices in every city and gives everyone who wants one a job that puts a roof over their heads and 3 squares a day. The armed forces isn't nearly enough to do it, at least in the absence of an actual conflagration, which is looking more and more likely by the day.

On the upside, the Mets swept a road series.