Here is a new voice that I read regularly: By Neddie Jingo!

Our Harvest Being Gotten In

As the Psihases saw it, moving into a bigger house was not something to be questioned, but something to be accepted, an axiom of American life. "Bigger bigger, better better," Georgia Psihas said. "It's just a part of life." And one that builders understand very well. In Orlando, workers are busy finishing up the New American Dream Home, the showpiece of the annual national conference of home builders. It will be 9,506 square feet, a place Alex Hannigan, the builder, calls "an all-about-me home." It has a guest wing, five fireplaces, three laundries, a hobby room, an elevator, a spa, a home theater, a summer kitchen, a chandelier lift -- not things that the average American can necessarily afford at the moment, Hannigan said. But, he added, "we figured we'd make this home in keeping with where our country's going."

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Oh Six

The sheer weight and inertia of American life kept our systems on their feet through 2005, despite a worsening economic climate and some harsh body blows, like the hurricanes that pounded oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. In a way, some perverse law of sociopolitical physics seemed to concentrate all the year's destructive potential in the devastation of New Orleans, Biloxi, and other Gulf Coast towns -- while the mighty din of motoring and cheeseburger sales roared on elsewhere without pause from Cape Cod to Catalina. First, a little background briefing on where we are at -- to use some of the bad grammar now normative in American life -- before I make predictions (i.e. guesses) about the year ahead. You can only introduce so much perversity into an economic system before distortions cripple it. From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit -- incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 to 20 percent a year forever. It became a reckless racket, all predicated on sustaining an economy that had lost its other means for generating wealth -- foremost its infrastructure for making things besides suburban houses.

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