Reply #34: Check back in twenty years. Tell me how it all turned out.

[hunter]

It's pretty damned obvious the U.S. standard of living is falling for most people, and it's because we built our economy on easy oil. Now that the remaining oil is not so easy our economy is faltering. It's one thing to stick a straw in the ground in Texas or California, and quite another to extract oil in deep water or from geographically remote areas, or oil controlled by unfriendly political regimes, or oil mired in corrupt business practices.

If my wife and I did the same work our parents did, we'd barely be able to afford a crappy used car and an apartment, and we wouldn't have health insurance. Our parents bought large houses in good neighborhoods, they could buy new cars, and they had good health and dental insurance.

Our grandkids are not going to care that their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents could drive all over the place without much worry about the cost of gasoline or the cost of building and maintaining highways.

I think we are about to see a great decline in the number of cars on the road, and soon a great decline in the number of cars per capita. If you look at the collapse of housing prices in places like Modesto in California, there's much more to it than the collapse of the mortgage bubble. Instead it seems people are thinking, Ooops, it doesn't look like we'll be able to afford that long commute to the coast.

If the "U.S.A. #1!" mentality isn't a vanity, especially at this point, and as frivolous as putting lipstick on a pig, than nothing is. We built a giant economy that was unsustainable, and a lot of people are going to suffer because of this, many more than those who benefited by it.