The FIRE Economy

I maintain I hold one of the few, rapidly disappearing manufacturing jobs in the U.S. I manufacture electricity. A stretch? Yes, perhaps. But as I bike up and down Franklin Blvd., and as I offer the following south to north listing of all the strip businesses I pass everyday, tell me we actually produce anything in this nation anymore:

SF Market
Cash 1 Check Cashing
Walgreen's
Raley's Supermarket
Hollywood Video
B&S Oriental Market
Q The Style
Gas Station
US Post Office
Prince of Peace Church
Security Public Storage
Hair Plus Beauty Supply
Fiji Indian Food Market
Maharaja Indian Restaurant
Goodwill
Rite Aid
FoodMaxx
Carl's Jr.
Pizza Hut
Suzie's Adult Superstore
Goeman's Bar
Hanson Realty
Sacramento Japanese Methodist Church
Southgate Glass
Southgate Veterinary Hospital
Japanese Motor Shop
United Carburetor and Auto
Unlimited Smog Stop
Exotic Aquarium
Extra Space Storage
Public Storage
Overhead Door Company
Pedro Auto Sales
Atlas Muffler Shop

Look, I understand that listing all the strip retail on a particular boulevard in Anytown, USA and then claiming we don't manufacture anything is fraught with inaccuracy. Most manufacturing isn't done on a collector road in suburbia -- it's done in factories on the margins, in heavily mechanized and automated facilities. We don't allow manufacturing sites anywhere near "clean" suburbia; instead we offer "clean industries" such as Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE), in their own single use office parks and towers only a short easy drive from suburbia. Keep them separated, damn it. Can't imagine the property value hit a residential subdivision would take if it fell withing walking distance of an office park. Horrors!

Along Franklin Blvd. not a damn thing is built -- it's all about servicing the vehicles necessary to live here, about offering fried food to all those drivers in drive-thru's, about storing myriad consumer consumables in storage pods, and about praying to various Gods for salvation with manicured hands and nice hairdos.

We don't build anything here, and I am at odds with trying to understand how our economy will grow when during the boom years of 2001-2006 we grew largely on the hallucinated wealth of financial gaming, speculation, and leveraging...we grew on the burning of a FIRE economy. With all of that now up in smoke, where exactly is our future growth going to come from?