Recently, our local government held a budget retreat to plan the 2013 budget. The press release following this preliminary budget goal setting was sobering at the minimum. We are by now accustomed to government officials applying the most positive possible spin on an announcement. If this were indeed the positive spin, I hate to contemplate the true reality.
The government official stated to those gathered; “We can no longer do more with less, or even the same with less; that clearly we are going to do less with less”. He further stated “everything is on the table”. Today the local area comprised of a half million individuals is not yet grappling with double digit unemployment; it has the enviable unemployment rate of 6.7 percent. Nor is it grappling with severe mismanagement issues. However, as so many other government entities, it is grappling with sharply declining revenues, caused by the popping of the real estate bubble. This is an issue that will continue to grow during the course of the next few years.
This announcement is a story that many of the readers of Peak Oil Blues already have been living for the past 2 years or more, but it is just now beginning to arrive in my area. Many will read the first 2 paragraphs and yawn saying “been there, done that”. Let’s look more closely to determine why this issue here is so important.
It is occurring in an area that is not yet undergoing severe economic distress. That should be cause for alarm in other parts of the country where already unemployment is off the charts, and business is drying up. Secondly, it is a sign that things are truly not improving within our national economy. Finally, that our government officials do not see any improvement, or recovery on the horizon. This is not a short term problem with a quick fix. Painful reductions will be required to bring expenses and available revenues into balance.
As governments respond by trimming services and resources, the risks and responsibilities will be shifted right back on the shoulders of individual citizens. As the revenue continues its downward slide, many of the services that we depend on (the Essentials) to keep our communities and ourselves personally intact will contract to the point of being just a remaining shadow of service. Imagine having severe chest pains, calling 911, only to be informed that the EMS service can’t get to you until they have taken care of the three other citizens already waiting ahead of you. Picture yourself calling in to report a burglary in progress, only to be told that the only available law enforcement cannot be there for another 2 hours, responding to a backlog of more pressing calls. Does this sound like the plot of a horror movie? Already this has become the reality in several areas our country today. I expect living in such scenarios to become more prevalent during the next 12 months.
The continued eroding of our Essentials will cause great anxiety over the next few years. It will be up to us as individuals to try to prevent break-ins, reduce fire hazards, and build enough cohesive strength of community around us to assist with such needs as transport to emergency medical care. Our responsibilities for well being are being shifted back to us from all levels of government. Our 911 system is a wonderful thing, but only if the needed help arrives in a timely manner. We suddenly find ourselves having to shoulder more of the responsibility for meeting the challenges of protecting our lives and property.
Fuel costs will impact many of our commercially supplied “Essentials”. The responsibility for locating and acquiring those “Essentials” will be totally our own. Right now, the responsibility is shared between the store owner and yourself. As long as the store owners can make a profit, after covering overhead, they will continue to try to meet their responsibility as a supplier to you the customer. But as the profit from doing so diminishes under the weight of rising fuel costs, owners will supply progressively fewer of your “Essentials”.
If you want to do an interesting experiment starting today, go to your favorite food store, pick an aisle in the canned goods area, count the number of steps from the beginning of the aisle to the end. Walk up and down the aisle several times; note the variety and brands of canned goods carefully. Repeat this process a year from now and see if anything has changed. This only works if the store doesn’t “remodel”. “Remodel” is a convenient term used to hide the fact that the store no longer carries as much merchandise or variety by shuffling its locations around the store. We will see lots of “remodeling” in the future.
Many of you will say this is too gloomy a posting, and surely cannot happen here. The sad fact is that already it is happening around you. The pace of change to a less with less lifestyle is gradual now and not readily apparent unless one stops and looks, but the dark horizon suggests that the process is about to speed up.
As our government officials stated “we can’t get more with less, or keep the same with less”. We will have to deal as individuals and communities with living less with less. The “essentials” are not only supplies, but services too. The time to start determining how you will accommodate a future with “less” is today.
After today the time that remains to make your plans is less.
Chuck
Yes, we are seeing this in my little town for the first time, where our choices are to close one elementary school or lay off 35 teachers/aides/administrators. Also seeing it on a statewide basis, especially in the state university in which I work, where it is clear to planners that there will not be increasing funds in 2013 or 2014, nor do they expect enrollment to grow.
In the US, we are not used to contractions, we expect growth, and easier times, not harder.
Peak Oil, Powerdown, Transition- these are painful, and will continue to be so. We are now actually seeing what we imagined might happen in the last few years, but with the details fleshed out. We were right! But, there is no great satisfaction in our or others discomfort, and our job is to make living with less as satisfying and useful as possible. Kudos to all who are trying to live as sustainably as possible.
All of you are living in a Time Warp. Maybe in your little cozy corner of the world things have not been amiss but for as long as I can remember living in the Other World our people have been struggling with low wages, forced to do without, live without, never having enough to get what you needed, forced to make do. We have been living under “severe economic stress” for decades. Forget the “Essentials”. If you are living in a less entitled demographic area, you’ve never had the privilege of police protection, only police harassment. Many less entitled folk don’t even call the police for fear of having more trouble arrive at their doorstep because they are poor. Guilty until proven innocent. The poor prey on the poor because they know their own social strata and know the rate at which victims hide the crime for fear of more serious abuse from the cops. Maybe this great unraveling will be the biggest REALITY CHECK for some people. Maybe people will become more conscious of the fact that they were way too critical toward others who were struggling and being blamed for their economic condition when in fact it was really the American Caste System’s way of supplanting any of your greatest ambitions just because you were born into The Land of the Abyss. Maybe people who are downwardly mobile at this moment will become more humane and empathetic toward their fellow peers. Maybe they would realize that the poor are not lazy or unambitious, in fact quite the opposite. It’s just that a 40 hour work week at $8.00 an hour without benefits goes a lot less far than a job paying $40 an hour with benefits. Or that a worker doing a waitress, walmart or PCA job is on her feet 8 hours at a time and working CONSTANTLY, usually alot harder than anyone at a desk job. The lower the pay usually means a manual job. And the lower the pay means the harder one works manually. Someone working minimum wage actually USES her body, and works very hard. And usually has to put up with derogatory bosses, blatant sexism, racism and run of the mill abuse. Maybe people who are losing their homes in this economic downturn will realize how disrespectful they’ve been to those who have had to live in substandard housing or even those who have been homeless. Once they realize how important housing is to one’s stability and emotional health they may someday understand that if it wasn’t for their inheritance or their stepping stone parents gifts or their trust fund or that piece of land as a wedding gift, they may never have had the leg up needed to accomplish just what standard they had accomplished. And if they lose it all now and have to start from the bottom up all over again, maybe they would start to get a tiny sliver of perception of how hard it must be for immigrants or first
generation americans to try to get a tiny little hovel in nowhere’sville because it’s snob zoning and you aren’t allowed to build your own small home even though you know how to but need to build a freakin’ McMansion with 300 foot frontage, never mind the $25,000 septic system and the 80% efficiency insulation code. Try doing that with an $8.00 an hour job ! No one will understand other people’s suffering until they are hit with the same conditions. But who supported this burgeoning monstrosity of hell in our little towns anyway? Why it was they who wanted to keep the chaff at bay, and wanted all of the amenities that big cities have without the eyesore disenfranchised at their doorstep. In the land of plenty collapse is just a figment of the imagination. Even at the 11th hour the town of Chesterfield, MA decided to build a new school, a skateboard park and put in place severe zoning codes for windpower use. So you all have asked for it. Could you not have seen the writing on the wall? You have all gotten your wishes granted. I say you get what you des
Thanks Chuck for your insights and efforts put to this site.I work for a very old institution for most of my life. I watched it go from a grandiose organization to having to offer voluntary retirement packages to balance the budget for the first time in their 150 year history.I strongly sense a lack of cohesive acceptance of the actual economic realities they face going forward. I am reminded of one of Kathy’s articles titled the illusion of sameness regularly. Sometimes I want to join the optimists (which I usually was) and act as if this is just another economic cycle that we will come out of unscathed.However, this optimism would make feel delusional.The dialogue in my head says my perspective is going askew.I am becoming negative and just looking for negative articles to validate my negative perception.I want to scream out, when the hell are we going to collapse already so I can end the debating committee in my head or is this really happening but in slow motion. This is stressful stuff,I feel a bit like phony when I keep on acting as if everything will be the same eventually.
How lucky you are to live in a place where a public official can even utter the words “less with less”. That the effects are not yet locally obvious makes it even more miraculous.