From the Economist: Business in America: Too much of a good thing We may think the US is a competitive market, but that is not what has been happening in the past 30/40 years as mega-mergers have consolidated markets. Typically, nowadays, there are 2, 3, or four main marketeers who dominate the market and a handful of "also rans". One of the biggest-in-the-making is Amazon. See here: The lack of market competitiveness simply means that consumers pay more because of the lack of any real competition. Product niches are made to all "look alike" and their differentiation in the mind of the consumer has been drastically lessened. Price differentials are minimal thus underlining the contention that market-competition is practically non-existant. Excerpted from the above linked Economist article:
Yes. In the U.S. the financial sector has sucked up nearly all of the productivity gains made in the last 40 odd years, and upward mobility has been stagnant over the same time period as well. France has more upward mobility than the U.S. I will also note the irony of the Economist running such articles, and it runs such commentary all the time, and will run them along with the usual contradictory commentaries about how the real problems are as always the poor not working nearly long enough hours and making too much money. It's kind of funny, really how they will straddle such issues even in the same articles, but it remains my favorite general world news magazine despite their editorial slants. Their horror over Trump is pretty entertaining as well. The right wing still worships tax cuts, despite their routine failure to even remotely match any of the fantastic economic miracles they insist on attributing to them; as a small businessman myself the Number One concern is the continuing decline in disposable incomes and shrinking customer base, tax cuts are way down the list of worries. Tax cuts for the shareholders of Walmart and the like isn't going to result in any price decreases, no matter what the right wing think tanks keep churning out of their propaganda mills. We're a network of oligarchies controlling everything from raw materials to transportation to food to oil to media, and the barriers to entry are huge; the big boys have almost zero competition while the middle to the bottom of the food chain can't subsist on the leftovers and requires massive debt assumption merely to exist. Note the utter absurdity of 30 year mortgages and 6 year auto loans. My grandparents thought 3 year mortgages were lunatic extravagances and risky.
Lemme see that accusation proved in print, please. Any article from the Economist, any point in time. I happen to think that they are fairly even-minded, dead-center on most items. The Replicant Right is so bozo that what they say or print is often beyond belief and therefore even response except ... awe at the stoopidity. Yes, agreed. Trump is so keen on eviscerating Obama's record in office that he wanted to destroy BamaCare. Then he discovered - WOW! - that Americans are finally beginning to like it! See here: ObamaCare just keeps getting more popular - excerpt: And when I see the number of international polls that put US healthcare near dead bottom of the list (see here), I keep wondering what the 33% (who would repeal it) really want. Of course, if they're the younger set, they really don't see the need. The older one gets, the more important is a National HealthCare Service (NHS) that is free, gratis and for nothing. A NHS is typical of the countries with the higher lifespans, which is obvious from this infographic here: HealthCare is far, far more important to each American than a DoD-expense that sucks-up 54% of the total National Budget. (See that here.)
