America's Fiscal House

This week on Cotto & Co. host Joseph Cotto will speak with Aaron Clarey, a popular economist known as Captain Economist, who believes that America’s fiscal house has been out of order far too long to spruce it up again.

Our national unemployment rate continues to hover at perilous highs, dependence on public assistance is skyrocketing, and race relations have been set back several years in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting, now possibly eclipsed by that of Michael Brown.

All of this is just the tip of a colossal iceberg, but the point makes itself.

Clarey, an economist who is also a fossil-hunter and dancer, thinks that the fundamentals of American life are well out of step with financial realities. People wish to have a spouse, comfortable house in the suburbs, nice cars, and, of course, children. While this noble aspiration has become a staple of U.S. culture, if it cannot be financed, then it is nothing more than a fantasy to pass the time.

The reality which one will wake up to hardly resembles what most would describe as the American Dream. Rather, it is a scenario in which college students saddled with six-figure debt work at jobs designed for high-schoolers. It is a scenario in which multinational banks receive excessive government bailouts after they wrecked the housing market with predatory loan schemes.