It's finally over, but it's really just beginning

What a messed up week. The biggest shopping time of the year and no one could get into the city to take local businesses from red into black for the year. I was personally effected because my interview was put off during this week and will probably not happen to the new year. And even worse for my Indian friend Ekta, who is now back in India, will not be able to just drop by for an interview like the one she had scheduled the day she left that was cancelled by the strike.

And that's just the icing, or rather the mud on this dirt cake. The millions of hours lost in productivity. The hundreds of millions of lost tax revenue are like the 9/11 on the recession we were having in 2001. There were deficits seen on the horizon and now we've lost our buffer. And most of the deficit to our city will be the product of rising healthcare costs, the very reason the TWU local 100 went on strike in the first place. They don't want to pay more to get more. No one realizes that health costs are going up cause more people are using more services. Ulcer drugs, cancer drugs, AIDS drugs, cholesterol drugs, and not only are we all discovering we need one or the other we're all living long enough to basically guarantee part of our life on drugs. They are all life savers, we should be grateful for the new drugs we have and appreciating the quality of life that still keeps on rising even after we've doubled our own life expentancy last century. And we should even be worried about the drop in drug innovation over the past few years, but that's another story. All this is beside the point that our medical insurance system is defunct with 20% administration costs lowering all of our coverage.

The strike brought up the issue of pensions starting later, at 62 instead of 55 in this case. More and more we have an economy of services where people can work with little exertion as opposed to an industrial state where "workin' in the coal mine" is just impossible after 55. We have to be understanding of those in heavy labor but Mayor Bloomberg brought up an interesting point at yesterdays news conference. He said there are no easy answers. Well yes there are, it's just very hard to make them because we have to hurt now so we hurt less later and no one wants to do that. We must save now so we have something to spend later. We still haven't answered the social security question because we don't like taking away what seems to be working at this very moment. We KNOW we're going to live longer, we KNOW healthcare is only going up, we KNOW it's going to cost us more and yet the burden of providing for our retirements has dramatically shifted back to the employee instead of the employer. We are not a nation of saving anymore. We were until around the 60's and 70's but now we spend spend spend. It's one of the reasons our economy is so booming (or rather our GDP is high even if the lower classes aren't benefiting from it), because living beyond your means literally creates a bigger economy, but it also shrinks your own safety net. At a time when our government has been killing our safety net (just this week taking $8 billion away from people in NEED of medicare) now is not the time for companies and individuals to forget about their own futures.