House Of Cards Teeters On Brink

Imbalance Up-Date: Not just income inequity.

The growing imbalance between real wealth creation and worthless paper pushing is bad news

Progressive Flo & the GEICO Gecko illustrate that the economy & financial system are a complete fucking joke.

But these two represent something different, something apocalyptic -- and I say that not merely because their maddening ubiquity has driven me to the brink of insanity. I say it because they are peddling the kind of commodity that offers little tangible worth, waging a fight that promises no valuable innovation, and representing a larger insurance and finance sector that's hollowing out our economy.

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In the global economy's increasingly fierce fight for genuine value and better living standards, this might not be so problematic if America's wealth-creating sectors (i.e., making things or providing valuable services) remained substantially larger than wealth-cannibalizing sectors like insurance and finance. But since the 1980s’ decline of manufacturing, the insurance and finance sector has doubled its share of gross domestic product, hitting 8 percent last year. That's twice as large as both the construction and information sectors -- and ongoing taxpayer bailouts promise to exacerbate the asymmetry even more.

This is certainly great for insurance companies -- for example, it provides them excess billions to buy an absurd amount of ads. For the rest of us, though, the growing imbalance between real wealth creation and worthless paper pushing is bad news -- and that’s why the gecko and Flo are so deeply disturbing. More than just the moment's most annoying shills, they are the cheeky visages of our nation's long-term economic decline.

And you, our "fellow" Americans, are the punchline.