Could take a novel approach. Bite the bullet, increase savings, and buy back all those bonds the Chinese, Japanese and every one else has been financing. Of course, that will mean less consumption and living more lean.
Unions are irrelevant. What matters is a government that will no environmental rules and no rules forcing companies to waste money on worker safety and safe products.
We can compete very well on an even play field.
Nobody is thrilled to work in a sweatshop and unsafe conditions. China is facing some union organizing and battles now. Workers will eventually fight exploitation. Until they do, American workers are screwed.
I’m curious as to what you think justifies America’s high standard of living?
Or REALLY bite the bullet and seriously raise taxes on the rich instead of the rest of us subsidizing them. They have most of the money, after all. And “reducing consumption and living more lean” isn’t likely to help if they are permitted to keep amassing a more and more disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth. You want money, you need to go where the money is; and in America that isn’t either the poor or middle class and hasn’t been for a long time.
I’m curious as to why you think that uncrowded living quarters, a varied and adequate diet, and adequate health care somehow constitute unreasonable expectations for Americans. Or perhaps such privileges are supposed to be reserved for marvelously enlightened beings such as yourself and not for the worker bees?
Just how low a standard of living are you willing to accept?
Doesn’t do a damn bit of good if the rich go right on pumping wealth out of the country.
LonesomePolecat has a point. Critics of American wastefulness & indulgence have a point ( and I’m hardly slow to criticise America ), but I do suspect that there’s a happy medium between sucking the world dry for profit and between living in unheated shacks eating rats.
As a Contrarian investor…I LOVE threads like these.
I walked into a bookstore and the best seller rack was filled to the brim with doom & gloom.
Keep it up! I’ve managed to miss about half of the downturn over the past year and a half (the bear market did not start last October but last january) and now am within spitting distance of being where I was pre-bear. 
Doom & gloom…keep it up!
We are not “sucking the world dry”. There are plenty of resources ot go around, and vast infinities in space (which are accessible, even with today’s technology). Trade will help bring the world more and more up to our standards. Unfortunately, Marxist-influenced pseudo-intellectuals have for more than a century spread the idiot idea that anybody’s gain is somebody else’s loss.
Why, it’s almost liek they’re too ignorant to understand Wealth of Nations.
We’ve certainly tried.
No, the resources in space aren’t accessible; there just isn’t the infrastructure for it, and nothing up there is valuable enough ( in the short term economic sense that is ).
Impossible, the world couldn’t sustain an entire planetary population living like us. And we spend on exploiting others; a world all like us would have no one to exploit. No vast pools of desperate people willing to or forced to work for a pittance, for example.
It’s more like anyone who has a grasp of ethics and morality doesn’t care. And the people being treated like slaves or bombed so we can indulge ourselves are hardly going to buy your argument that they are being crippled or dying young for their own good.
Hi. Have you bought gas recently? We’re all dumping our wealth out of the country in that respect.
Probably not much smaller than the 500 sq ft condo I own with my girlfriend. These aren’t “privileges”. My girlfriend and I both work stressfull careers that we spent years of schooling and training to get. We save and live within our means. We opted for buying a modest condo outside of Manhattan instead of renting or buying the same space in the city for twice as much. We don’t “deserve” anything. We buy what we can afford and work to make as much as we can without sacrificing our entire personal lives too much.
It’s that whole idea of “expectations” that in your infinite sense of entitlement you don’t seem to grasp. “I expect”, “I deserve”, “I want”, “I need”. The world does not care what you and the rest of America think they deserve. In our modern global economy, companies will bring jobs to the people who do it faster, cheaper or better, wherever they happen to be.
Who is supposed to provide you with this arbitrary standard of living you feel entitled to? Some people seem to want to tax the wealthy but where is this wealth going to be created in the coming decades? What happens when we run our of rich people to distribute wealth from?
Ah, but the Chinese are facing their own set of contradictions. They’re hurting now, since we’ve stopped buying their stuff. They can either make sure we are rich enough to buy it, or encourage domestic consumption. That can only be done by raising wages, which makes their manufacturing uncompetitive - and it will move to Vietnam and Bangladesh, or maybe Africa.
Not to mention that their restrictions on childbirth is going to cause them to run into their own demographic crisis pretty soon, as relatively few kids take care of lots of elders.
Things are tough all over.
I think we are going to return to a sustainable economy, more like the '50s than the last decade. For the past ten years or so business had (thought they) solved this inherent problem - how do you increase profits by screwing your employees while making sure there were still people around with enough money to buy your products? The method was to make sure regulators looked the other way while you got banks to extend credit to people who couldn’t afford it. Sure it couldn’t last, but the CEOs were making a killing, so who cared?
Did you notice that one of the complaints about the new credit card law was that it was going to make credit harder to get? About time! I know the credit card companies want to resist consumers getting slapped in the face with information about the high rates, because then they may reduce their debt load. Too bad. We’re saving again - finally.
The thing that is going to save us is high energy prices. That will have two benefits. The first is that it will help grow the renewable energy industry, which we may have a shot at leading. As long as energy prices are subsidized in China and such, we may have a shot at making stuff here. Second, the increased cost of shipping may help bring manufacturing back. It was beginning to happen when gas was $4. It won’t help the information industry, though.
After the recession, the best thing the feds can do is to slap an energy tax on, one way or another. Cost effective ways of saving energy is going to be a win win for us. Maybe we can pay for increased wages with energy efficiency.
It’s not business’s job to “solve” that problem. There’s no monolithic Business that runs the economy. It’s the sum of all the businesses big and little.
I have no doubt that we will eventually reach a new stable equilibrium and then growth will begin again. The question is what will that new economic landscape look like?
That’s nonsense. Taxes will not lead to increased wages. It will lead to decreased real wages until alternative cheaper energy is found (if ever).
Who else is in the running? I’ve been holding out hope that we’ll be the first to utilize a successful replacement for fossil fuels and it will “save” us. Maybe it’s a pipe dream.
The problem here is how one defines recovery. Will we get back to a healthy economy? Yes, probably. Will we get back to one where there is a lot of hype and paper value floating around? Eventually, but not quickly.
I see a lot of nanotech revolutionizing building materials kind of like plastics did in the middle-late 20th.
We would not be in this mess if most Americans lived like you do. And most Americans are going to have to reset their standards down to this type of prudent lifestyle of buying what you can afford or lving within your means.
I lived in dumpy ass rentals for about the first 10 years of my professional working life and then bought my first condo with cash.
I must be the first person to use the term “business” as a collective noun then. Duh.
Minimizing wages while maintaining sales maximizes profit to shareholders, which is the job of business.
You don’t necessarily need cheaper energy. You need to conserve what we got. Remember how the decline in demand due to the beginning of the recession made prices crash, and make the drill baby drill people look more like fools than ever?
There are tons of things that can be done to reduce demand, but it will only make business sense with higher energy prices. The hotel I stayed at in Barcelona had a system that turned off everything in the room unless the keycard was in a holder. No air conditioners blasting empty rooms. Energy in Spain is expensive enough to make that worthwhile. Putting that in means more jobs, and more jobs means higher wages also due to competition.
Got it now?