Tomorrow's New York Times features a very long front-page story by our friends Michael Powell and Motoko Rich, "Across the U.S., Long Recovery Looks Like Recession." For those of us in the East Valley and in Pinal County, where our house is, the Great Recession's sputtering recovery seems more like the Great Depression:
Florence, Ariz.
In 2005, Arizona ranked, as usual, second nationally in job growth behind Nevada, its economy predicated on growth. The snowbirds came and construction boomed and land stretched endless and cheap. Then it stopped.
This year, Arizona ranks 42nd in job growth. It has lost 287,000 jobs since the recession began, and the fall has been calamitous.
Renee Wheaton, 38, sits in an old golf cart on the corner of Tangerine and Barley Roads in her subdivision in the desert, an hour south of Phoenix. Her next-door neighbor, an engineer, just lost his job. The man across the street is unemployed.
Her family is not doing so well either. Her husband’s hours have been cut by 15 percent, leaving her family of five behind on water and credit card bills — more or less on everything except the house and car payment. She teaches art, but that’s not much in demand.
“I say to myself ‘This can’t be happening to us: We saved, we worked hard and we’re under tremendous stress,’ ” Ms. Wheaton says. “My husband is a very hard-working man but for the first time, he’s having real trouble.”
Arizona’s poverty rate has jumped to 19.6 percent, the second-highest in the nation after Mississippi. The Association of Arizona Food Banks says demand has nearly doubled in the last 18 months.
Elliott D. Pollack, one of Arizona’s foremost economic forecasters, said: “You had an implosion of every sector needed to survive. That’s not going to get better fast.”
To wander exurban Pinal County, which is where Florence is located, is to find that the unemployment rate tells just half the story. Everywhere, subdivisions sit in the desert, some half-built and some dreamy wisps, like the emerald green putting green sitting amid acres of scrub and cacti. Signs offer discounts, distress sales and rent with the first and second month free.
Discounts do not help if your income is cut in half. Construction workers speak of stringing together 20-hour weeks with odd jobs, and a 45-year-old woman who was a real estate agent talks of her job making minimum wage bathing elderly patients. Many live close to the poverty line, without the conveniences they once took for granted. Pinal’s unemployment rate, like that of Arizona, stands at 9.7 percent, but state officials say that the real rate rises closer to 20 percent when part-timers and those who have stopped looking for work are added in.
At an elementary school near Ms. Wheaton’s home, an expansion of the school’s water supply was under way until thieves sneaked in at night and tore the copper pipes out of the ground to sell for scrap.
Five miles southwest, in Coolidge, a desert town within view of the distant Superstition Mountains, demand has tripled at Tom Hunt’s food pantry. Some days he runs out.
Henry Alejandrez, 60, is a roofer who migrated from Texas looking for work. “It’s gotten real bad,” he says. “I’m a citizen, and you’re lucky if you get minimum wage.”
Mary Sepeda, his sister, nods. She used to drive two hours to clean newly constructed homes before they were sold. That job evaporated with the housing market. (Arizona issued 62,500 housing permits several years ago; it gave out 8,400 last year.)
“It’s getting crazy,” she says, holding up a white plastic bag of pantry food. “How does this end?”
You put that question to Mr. Pollack, the forecaster. “We won’t recover until we absorb 80,000 empty houses and office buildings and people can borrow again,” he says.
When will that be?
“I’m forecasting recovery by 2013 to 2015,” he says.
Hmm, Jeff Flake will be his seventh or eighth term in Congress by then. Till that time, he'll continue his crusade against any government spending to stimulate the economy, he'll continue voting against unemployment insurance and any "safety net" for the middle class-turned-poor, and he'll continue his fight to make sure that comfortable millionaires and billionaires pay no taxes.
And of course he'll take credit for the eventual economic recovery although he did everything he could -- deregulate and let the money men run wild on Wall Street -- to create the Great Recession.
And of course you, the asshole voters of the Sixth Congressional District, will just keep voting for him and the other right-wing Republicans.
