A British newspaper has a frontpage story proclaiming, with some glee, that the United States has entered a new Great Depression.
This is a silly exaggeration, it seems to me. (The paper bases its conclusion on a small uptick of the number of Americans on foodstamps, which was primarily caused, the paper itself admits, by an advertising effort to get eligible people to sign up for them!) But certainly many Americans are going through hard times. I read somewhere that, though by most measures the economy has been booming, the soaring prices of food and fuel have hit average families really hard, impacting them in concrete ways and making them feel the pain despite what the abstract overall numbers say. Now the big financiers are also feeling the hurt.
I worry about the economy, but I also worry about what seem like draconian plans for the government to regulate it all. (If you really want to get scared, read this