America's Boom Has Begun

US Economy revolves around consumer spending, so the more people spend, the better the economy does. Last year, consumer spending hit a brick wall, and then recovered, thanks to our ability to shop on-line. Service industry has not yet recovered, and as a result the total spending is still not fully recovered, but that is expected to change.

 

Good news, except that they say the sales surge is due to stimulus checks. If stimulus money aka 'emergency cash' is spent on purses, sun-glasses and video games, then there was no emergency to begin with. Same was true with Trump-Money last year, much of which was invested in the stock market when people couldn't think of better use for the excess cash.

US stocks climb as jobless claims hit pandemic-era low and retail sales surge
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...ic-era-low-and-retail-sales-surge/ar-BB1fGx2r

• US stocks climbed on Thursday after weekly jobless claims feel to a pandemic-era low of 576,000.
• Also helping boost stocks was a strong retail sales report, which showed 10% growth as stimulus checks worked its way into the economy.

US stocks surged on Thursday following better than expected weekly jobless claims and retail sales data boosted confidence that the economic reopening is progressing.

Jobless claims fell to a pandemic-era low of 576,000, below economist estimates of 700,000. The previous week's jobless claims count was revised higher to 769,000.

 

Here is a great article that ties it all together.

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/ric...s-peak-and-the-signs-of-decline-are-piling-up

 

Except when that spending is fueled by debt, because then that spending is ultimately unsustainable, and will result in reduced levels of spending in the future, so can be very bad.

One has to ask if this "booming" economy is being fueled by surging national debt.

 

OUTSTANDING DEBT

For as long as other-nations want to hold American debt, there is no problem.

When they start putting their money elsewhere, then Uncle Sam is going to have a problem.

So far, national debt as a percentage of GDP is spiking by as much as 20% in this past year. (See the Debt-to-GDP ratio here.)

But the ratio is much, much higher than the pre-Covid years. And even in the ten years pre-Covid the ratio increased from 64% in 2008 to 103% in 2020 (before Covid).

That jump is outstanding in nature and making a growing number of economists worried. Why in hell Donald Dork reduced upper-income taxation - which only reduced taxable income revenues - I will never understand. The guy should be on trial for Monumental Fiscal Incompetence.

But if you look at the recent history of the above linked chart, ask yourself who were in office as of 2009 when the significant rise in the National-Debt-to-GDP-Ratio was starting its significant rise? Barack Obama and Joe Biden ...

 

I see that as a bit of circular logic, since as soon as there's any sign of a problem, it will make other nations not want to hold this debt.

This thing could unwind rather quickly and it would be nasty.

 

And what other debt exists that is worth holding? The UK? The EU?

Just joking ... !

 

America's Boom? This is likely to be the start of America's slide into crippling poverty due to monetary and supply-side inflationary costs. It will compound the detrimental effects that five decades of immigration policies has had on overpopulating environmentally and economically unsustainable regions with overwhelmed public and private infrastructure. The shutdown permanently damaged the economic viability of businesses and transportation hubs within states and cities comprised of the most vulnerable populations. The quality, value and benefits of jobs and businesses within these hardest hit areas are likely to be outweighed by consumption costs.

We are taking more than we are giving. To me, the math doesn't equate to an American boom. For example, even though the Jobless numbers are improved, March 2021 saw the largest US Poverty rate since the pandemic began.

 

Well, it is certainly a logic that foreign-countries eagerly accept.

After all, with which other country should they want to invest their funds. Russia? England? (Maybe China?)

Not much choice out there nowadays ...

 

The above (well-written) is a slight exaggeration of the factual evidence. We have a large, educated (for the most part) population. Unfortunately, we, as a nation, have not emphasized the importance of Civics Instruction, which is key to any sense of "democratic fairness". (Electing political-representatives in cities, states and the country is the key-element of any True Democracy.)

Being a two-party system has both strong-and-week points. The strongest is the fact that there is major national competition between just two parties, but said selection of either representation in Congress or the Presidency is honest (according to the law).

The only major defect (and it is OUTSTANDING) occurred in 1803 when the Electoral College was created at a time when it was very difficult to get the results of state-voting to Congress in Washington, DC. (Public Trains did not exist until the 1830s in the US!)

That mistake should be repaired by means of instituting the Popular Vote as do all other major countries on earth.

PS: The countries that use an Electoral College voting-process are Burundi, Estonia, India, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Myanmar, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago and Vanuatu. The Seanad Éireann (Senate) in Ireland is also employs an electoral college.

 

How did my argument about economic issues turn into a response about the Electoral College? It doesn't even relate to the issues I brought up. Economic issues. The basis for this thread.

 

Because the two are intimately intertwined - Economic Issues and How we elect governments. (Anyone who witnessed what happened in the US when a not-so-great movie-star (Regan) became PotUS and starkly reduced Upper-income Taxation - which benefited a single political-party (Replicant) that then legally manipulated national-voting to gain control of Federal-government spending.

I keep saying the same thing:
*We must tax-away enormous Money Incomes - when anyone has one or two megabucks (net taxation), then they can live excellent lives without the least worry.
*We must employ whatever investment necessary to educate our kids into post-secondary schooling - and that must be done by means of government financial assistance. (Their economic well-being nowadays depends almost wholly upon education, education, education.)
*In this manner we will produce a more knowledgeable-and-active democracy the unique benefit of which is a sound-economy (from which an entire nation benefits).

You may like to keep different subjects separate. It's easier in that manner to discuss the merits/demerits of each. Unfortunately, the whole of any economic-society is the addition of its separate-but-integrated parts. The more developed an economic-society becomes the more difficult it is to assure fairness in key-needs. (Not only a good job, but a good education, and thus an economy with sufficiently well-built goods-and-services for all to benefit.)

All that amalgam requires (1) dynamic/wholesome private-enterprise and (2) assiduous government oversight to assure that the economic benefit is shared equitably. Which means "fairly"!

So, what does fairly mean? This comparison applies:
*All born in the US have the guaranty of a complete educational-cycle up to and including Tertiary (Post-secondary) Education.
*All migrants should be able to attain the same ultimate societal-objective (of fairness).
*Those who are not "pure white" either Americanized or American-born have the same fair-chance to excel in their endeavors by means of a decent education allowing them to earn decent incomes regardless of their family histories!
*Ie, no interpersonal cultural-discrimination whatsoever in the nation.

 

So you evidently think that economics is separate from governmental decision-making on the part of the nation's PotUS ... ?

 

Until they spend too much money and the market crashes. Can't happen?

Yes, it happens very often! Howzat? Because the American consumer typically borrows money in order to purchase. And when the borrowing gets too high along with far too many in debt who no longer pay-of their debts - then the economy nosedives.

Total national consumer-debt is a key-qualifier for any economy. And it has always been.

Too much and too fast of an economic-growth can be just as bad as too little ...

I'm not absolutely sure that "shopping on line" is the ultimate dictator of consumer-spending. But, I'll grant you that it is key. In terms of volume however I suspect that on-line consumer spending simply replaces "off-line". It's easier to do, so people "do it".

Yes, it will indeed, as soon as Covid definitely begins to subside. So, the more people who get an anti-Covid shot there are, then the better are chances that the economy recovers its footing. (Which is always the American consumer.)

What surprises everybody is that the Yanks - with amazingly quick reaction - should be in a better condition than Europe that started "shooting" just a few weeks ago.

But it shouldn't. What is happening now is answering the question , "Who gets what in terms of anti-Covid inoculations"? And since the medicine-providers are American and European in origin, it those two entities that should recover first.

NB: I am a wee-bit surprised that China has not come out with an antidote particularly after SARS in 2003 that killed hundreds of Chinese. So, I thought its leaders might be a lot more keen to get a handle on Covid, which also started there. But, they haven't. Nonetheless, it also appears that they have adopted a Japanese antidote called "favipiravir". (See here.)

 

Around 2004 election cycle Alan Greenspan went on front of the TV cameras to tell Americans to take advantage of exotic mortgages, when he knew full and well that interest rates for such mortgages had nowhere to go but up. The next few years people re-financed their houses to pull out the equity and spend it on new BMWs and renovation projects. They used their houses for ATM, and the rest it history. The housing market crashed, and left people owing banks more money than their houses were worth. Politicians pretended there was nothing to worry about and even as late as 2008 (another election cycle) they said the economy was on solid foundation. What a fiasco. During this time Bush launched 40 initiatives to push mortgages to low income people because he believed in "a house in every lot" theory.

 

I didn’t need the subject matter to be separated. I wanted you to make a connection between your statements about changing the Electoral College to a popular vote and the impact it would have on the economy. From what I can gather, the crux of your argument genuinely rests on the belief that a popular vote will help advance your political viewpoints. I assume you want to model the US economy like countries in Europe, but the EU is not a Democratic body. It’s an electorate that can override popular Democracy in its member nations. Each country sends an unelected delegate to vote for issues on behalf of the people in its state, so it’s basically an electoral college.

You want to educate people so they can acquire jobs and then you want to assure people jobs. Endless tax and spending in the hopes that one day there will be equity. Yeah. Equity is a concept I argue to a judge when there's no sound argument in law. Why? Cause if the laws could be replaced with subjective, equitable arguments, our entire financial system would cease to exist. Equity doesn't work out the way people intend. In France, people are allowed to make a decent wage, but the cost of living essentially gives people in the worst states in the US a better standard of living than the French. The proportion of people in the middle class in Mississippi is larger than in France after one adjusts for consumer costs.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012416/3-economic-challenges-france-faces-2016.asp

 

CLOSE TO A MILLION DEAD

True enough, voting in the US gets melancholic. The choices are not that good. Especially when they are jerk-heads like Donald Dork. Who, not once, was ever elected PotUS by means of a popular-vote. (You know, the kind the rest of the developed-world applies - but not the US!)

The US has been going from one war to another for more than a decade!

And that is the Major Point today. The US luxuriates in talk and admiration of its Rich & Very Rich. But, well, the poor can go to hell. Because, hey! They deserve it. Recruit the idiots and send them of to war! Some where! Anywhere!

What sort of "democracy' is that when one class dominates another? Come the next war, and it is some poor-slob who goes off to fight it and we sit comfortably on the sofa at home watching it on TV.

That is not the way it should be ... !

For sure, for sure. But, just the kinda guy the American people love-to-make president. Nice wife, Nice home. Pilot. Hey, what more do you want?

The guy started a war in the Middle-east that only now - decades later - we are leaving behind us. And the consequence of it all?

This (from here):

Close to a million people dead! But, what-the-hell, it was great for business ... !

 

I don't know how it was good for business, unless you are in the arms industry, or banking.

Rothchild's Formula (by Edward Griffin in 'The Creature From Jekyll Island')

1. War is the ultimate discipline to any government. If it can successfully meet the challenge of war, it will survive. If it cannot, it will perish. All else is secondary. The sanctity of its laws, the prosperity of its citizens, and the solvency of its treasury will be quickly sacrificed by any government in its primal act of self-survival.

2. All that is necessary, therefore, to insure that government will maintain or expand its debt is to involve it in war or the threat of war. The greater the threat and the more destructive the war, the greater the need for debt.

3. To involve a country in war or the threat of war, it will be necessary for it to have enemies with credible military might. If such enemies already exist, all the better. If they exist but lack military strength, it will be necessary to provide them the money to build their war machine. If an enemy does not exist at all, then it will be necessary to create one by financing the rise of a hostile regime.

4. The ultimate obstacle is a government which declines to finance its wars through debt. Although this seldom happens, when it does, it will be necessary to encourage internal political opposition, insurrection, or revolution to replace that government with one that is more compliant to our will. The assassination of heads of state could play an important role in this process.

5. No nation can be allowed to remain militarily stronger than its adversaries, for that could lead to peace and a reduction of debt. To accomplish this balance of power, it may be necessary to finance both side of the conflict. Unless one of the combatants is hostile to our interests and, therefore, must be destroyed, neither side should be allowed a decisive victory or defeat. While we must always proclaim the virtues of peace, the unspoken objective is perpetual war. (The Creature from Jekyll Island, 1994. G. Edward Griffin, pg. 230)

 

That aint necessarily so. It has been amply proven in the Middle-east that just the "threat of war" is sufficient for American forces to actually start one.

All you need to do (in America) is convince the public that the threat is alive-and-well. Which is how we got into Iraq on 19 March 2003 and we are just leaving Afghanistan - see here: Biden will withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021

My adding-machine puts that time-line at about 18 effing years! And the total cost?

See here from NBC: America has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says

Excerpt:

'Nuff said? No, not nearly enough. Vote Replicant, and they will find-a-war somewhere to put their Defense Industries back into profitability ... !

PS: And YOUR son/daughter would do just fine added to the pile of deaths already from there - not to mention those wounded returned to the US haplessly facing an existence on crutches or wheelchairs.

 

LafayetteBis, you seem to dart around with different big topic issues and seem to have trouble staying on a coherent topic in your threads.
I feel like I would want to argue with you about some of the issues you bring up in your threads, but also fill that it would be unfair to you, because it would easily derail what the original subject of the thread was about.
The point is, don't bring up multiple big controversial political issues in your thread unless you are okay with the thread getting taken over by an argument about one of those issues.

I predict your threads are not going to be very productive in terms of any dialogue since you lack coherent issues. You'll get different people arguing about 10 different things in a single thread, and those type of conversations are hard to follow.

It's just something to think about.
You don't have to follow this advice, of course, these are your threads, but if you don't I predict the discussions that take place in your threads will be trash. All over the place, and they won't really get anywhere, will be about something that's not even in the opening post.

 

IT CANNOT MATTER!

You obviously have no experience in professional debate. But neither does that matter here.

This place calls itself a "Debate" forum, and it does a pretty good job at it. But, it is very seriously removed from the official manner of doing so that has existed for a long, long time.

Frankly, the Internet has changed the fundamental nature of debate - and, in doing so, allows a far, far greater number to participate. And that is un-controvertible goodness!. Such Debate Forums are in real-time. Here we are on the Internet and the forums are accessible to a very large number of people of all ilks and professions. (That's great! Even if often chaotic.)

Let it all come out, because a very large portion of "ordinary opinion" is ugly, in fact. People express their "passions" more than their "thoughts". (I happen to live in a country with a high content of "passion", so I am fairly used to it.)

Any such "openly public" forum is somewhat helter-skelter. But, on the Internet, to make a forum obey existing official "Forum Rules" would mean very little "public opinion" would filter through.

So, it's good enough - and if it isn't then just move on. It doesn't really matter. Because it cannot matter ... !

 

YA-GOTTA-HAVE-SMARTS!

The underlining evolution that is smacking America has had a long time in coming. But IT IS HERE UPON US!

Economists have made the same point for at least 30 years. And it goes like this:

A "for-instance" (from here):

Clearly, the lead in the sector of "Informatics" has now transferred to California.

There is nothing wrong with how basic-industries have developed over time. The important element is that they do-indeed-develop and enjoy an acceptance from the American public in general. Whether the product is elementary in concept and comes from China is not The Real Problem. Except in the minds of some people WHO MUST THINK that the present is always better than the future.

My Point? In this brave-new-world of ours we must think differently. The developed-world is changing from Manufacturing Industries to Services Industries, which means the emphasis must be on higher-education such that the talents necessary are available because we make postsecondary education Free, Gratis and For Nothing.

There is not much that Uncle Sam can do about this Brave New World of ours. The sources of production of hard-goods has shifted elsewhere. Whyzzat? Because we allowed it to happen. First to Mexico 20/30 years ago and now to China (which in turn is seeing stiff-competition from countries nearby). I can attest to what happened personally in the plastics-industries, because I witnessed them myself.

My Golden Rule: Like it or not, world competition is going to get worse and not better for the US. So, it had best concentrate on the single-most outstanding factor. Which is this: There are two major-divisions in which jobs are typically found. They are Manufacturing & Services. Barely 12% of all work in the US is within the Manufacturing Sector. All the rest is in Services.

Services require a higher-level of education in most well-paying instances today in the US. So, what's the country to do? MOST CERTAINLY - it must make the access to post-secondary education needed for highly-skilled jobs FREE, GRATIS AND/OR FOR NOTHING! (Just like primary and secondary-schooling!)

If not, we will have a growing part of our population that are still looking for jobs in the basic-skills sectors that do not ordinarily have decent pay-structures. Nowadays, "ya gotta have smarts to get a decently good paycheck!"

 

What exactly does that mean? Embrace the future and just let momentum keep carrying us on course?

It's only changing because we are allowing it to change.

It's interesting to observe how manufacturing transferring to China made them rich in a very quick period of time.

Many of these service industries will be low paying. Even if you educate everyone the question remains whether there will be enough higher paying service jobs for everybody.

The real issue to notice here are the trade deficits. Many developed countries, especially the US, are buying more consumer goods and services than they are selling. That leads to a gradual loss of wealth over time.

Many experts have questioned the logic of trying to make everyone better compete for a limited number of jobs. Just because something can benefit the individual doesn't necessarily mean it will benefit the whole as a collective.

Unless this education will somehow help allow the US to sell their services to China (balancing the trade deficit). Something that I don't see happening.