“2018 was a good year for me, but I know overall, it was awful.” I’ve seen that sentiment, or variants of it, expressed from a lot of different people over the past couple of weeks. Enough to make me wonder, and come up with a few theories of my own. Because the thing is, 2018 by the numbers, in America, was a pretty great year, overall. The economy was roaring, we kicked ISIS’s ass, didn’t get in a war with North Korea, and saw some seriously awesome developments in private manned space flight! Sure, there were a few downsides as well, but I think the highs well outweighed the lows.
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| What the economy feels like sometimes. |
So what’s up? Discounting people who had specific, personal reasons for why 2018 was a terrible year (and I’ve had years like that, I understand), why the general downer sentiment?
My left-leaning friends seem to have a pretty obvious answer. Because every list of their personal 2018 highlights then segues into a list of all the bad things done by the Orange Man or his congressional minions, likely none of which actually effected them. Never go full TDS. My friends on the right seem to have similar issues, though usually they cast the blame on Democrats, the media, the government lying about the health of the economy, or Orange Man if they’re from the Never Trump brigade.
In short, I think politics and the media keep making people crazy.
Look, on the one side you have a media which is fully invested in making people believe that things are bad and getting worse. When even Jill Abramson admits that TDS sells papers, it should be apparent that there’s a problem. On the other side, the professional economic doom-sayershave been predicting the same thing for years. Sooner or later they’re going to be right.
“The problem with being a manic depressive is that you know sooner or later you’re going to be right, and the shit really is going to hit the fan.” – Doomsday, Wing Commander: End Run.
Is the economy in poorer shape than the feds in Washington want everyone to think? Probably. Are the numbers cooked to make them look better? Yes, but in the same way that they’ve been cooked for a couple of administrations now, which means that as long as the measures are the same, they’re still useful, even if they don’t tell the whole story.
I wish I had a real solution to the problem, but I suspect I’m just adding my voice to the screaming into the void at this point. The best I can do is suggest that folks should listen to their neighbors, to their friends, and pay a lot less attention to the media voices on either side. Keep eyes open (and good budget records) and see for yourself whether things are better or worse around you.
As for me, well, like I wrote previously, 2018 was pretty good for me. I’m hoping to build on that success for an even better 2019, regardless of what the talking heads tell me.