As you closed the book on 2010, you dared to imagine that maybe the economy was clawing its way back to health.
Retail spending surged in December, the stock market was up, corporate profits were up, General Motors had three straight profitable quarters, and there were signs that companies had stopped hemorrhaging jobs.
But then you picked up the Dec. 28 issue of The Denver Post and you abandoned all hope.
First, you read on the front page that Ed Mueller, CEO of Qwest Communications, received a juicy little Christmas plum this holiday season: the promise of $57 million in stock, cash severance and tax breaks.
You read that in addition, five other top executives of Qwest — which is merging with CenturyLink — also found compensation packages to the tune of $75 million in their stockings.
You realized any faint hope you had that in 2011, poor people would start to get a little more and rich people would get a little less is a bigger fantasy than the end of earmarks in Washington.
You asked yourself the same question you always do when you read about multimillion-dollar executive payouts: What exactly did Mueller — who has been at the helm of Qwest less than four years — do to deserve such a colossal golden parachute? Save the landline from extinction, launch a revolutionary new product or execute one particularly shrewd maneuver that saved the company millions of dollars? Or was it that under Mueller’s watch, an estimated 2,800 Qwest employees got their pink slips?
You realize you’ll probably never understand.
The next economic story you read on Dec. 28 was even more discouraging: In 2010, U.S. companies created more jobs overseas than they did in this country. According to the U.S. Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, American firms made 1.4 million hires in foreign countries, compared to 1 million here.
Had those 1.4 million jobs stayed here, the U.S. jobless rate — now 9.8 percent — would have dropped to 8.9 percent, according to the institute.
The reason for the overseas hires is that sales and demand in places such as China, India and Brazil are booming, according to a report in the Huffington Post. So U.S. companies aren’t the bad guys; they simply have to go where the markets are. Right?
And then, the final piece of gloom: Home prices in Denver and 19 other major cities fell 1.3 percent from September to October. For Denver, it was the fourth straight month of dropping prices. And the outlook is . . . lousy. Analysts expect housing prices will continue to fall in 2011, as thousands of foreclosures flood the market, credit remains tight and hiring is stuck in reverse. Some say we’re on the verge of — if not already in — a double-dip recession in housing.
Last, but not least, there’s that pesky deficit. The president’s tax-cut compromise with Republicans — extending the Bush-era tax cuts to all income levels rather than just the middle- and lower-income earners — is projected to increase the deficit from $1.3 trillion to $1.7 trillion this year.
Included in the deal Obama struck: a gift to the very wealthy in the form of a 35 percent tax on estates of more than $5 million. Democrats had been pushing for a 45 percent rate on estates of over $3.5 million.
Tradition and custom dictate that New Year’s stories have a positive spin — an inspirational message that leaves readers hopeful about the future. But in the case of our current economy, that’s a tall order.
So we embrace uncertainty. We keep our belts tightened, our pencils sharpened, our hearts grateful for all we do have, and our focus on the truth that often the only way past the darkness is through it.
Thin gruel, but better than no gruel.
Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver, a former Rocky Mountain News writer, works for . She writes for the op-ed page twice a month.
