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Bumping this thread. At the time of it's start, Obama was just leaving and the talk was arguably centered around the trade negotiations had been made too uneven and war spending was too high. Since then we've entered into various trade disputes seeking more favorable terms. We also saw relatively flat military spend increases in the earlier years, but this appears to be taking off again.
Do you believe either of these situations has made things better/worse, or is it too early to tell?
Do you believe either of these situations has made things better/worse, or is it too early to tell?
Military spending, the trade deficit, fiscal deficit, and the income/wealth disparity are all heading up. So I guess it depends on whether you believe that is good or bad.
As a result of globalization at too fast a pace, the US has become more like China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, just for example, than the other way around.
I'm not going to read this. LOL I'm still not even sure that Alibaba is a real company.
Yeah, it's a real company. A company that sells counterfeit items from stolen copyrighted intellectual property of artists. Just ask any crafting artist.
US is using the military to expand its markets for goods and services, while China has been using development loans to tap foreign markets. That was explained to Trump by his foreign policy advisors early in his term when he advocated ending the wars. The US military is used to market and sell the goods and services of private military contractors. Destruction of a country and its reconstruction is a very lucrative business for US companies and for diplomats and high-ranking officials in the military and security services who become paid lobbyists to help secure infrastructure and security contracts. Lately, the US is complaining that China is getting these governments deep into debt with these loans but the US has been doing this for many years. They're right since they're both engaged in predatory lending.
Also, Asia was mostly unaffected by the last financial crisis since the US and European banks were stuck with the bad loans.
Saw a news item today about Citigroup having set up a shell company to illegally keep foreclosed homes off the market.
I liked the rest of your post, but it bugs me when I see this parroted so often.
The US didn't benefit from devastation in other parts of the world. Else we would have had a big net export surplus and we did not. Actually the US economy took off in a big way starting in the early 1930s, not post WW2. What we experienced was a big ramp up in domestic investment in production. We made great strides in automation and productivity, and those gains were shared with employees. This went on for ~40 years. The median worker income actually rose at the same rate as per capita GDP.
Since the mid 70s it has been very different. The oligarchs used finance (helped by fiat money) and globalization to greatly reduce their dependence on consumer wealth, and to make themselves massively wealthy. GDP has been great, but the gains are only split among the few.
You do understand that the spread in those curves between real median wages and the real gdp per person is labor productivity in our economy. As the total output has risen our labor costs “wages” has remained relatively flat. This means that we produce goods/services far more efficiently and that the costs of the people are much lower as a proportion of the overal total. Thus the cost of raw inputs has risen substantially.
This trend will continue if not get more exacerbated through the increased focus of robotics, automation, and AI.
If I’m spending $50k on a vehicle and my options are a Cadillac crossover that has a crap powertrain, interior, and transmission but I’m covering a significant amount of labor overhead for their union employees. Or I can go buy a Genesis GV80 build in a state of the art facility by robots and a handful of low wage employees but get a great powertrain, world class interior, and superior transmission. Well the choice is easy and it sure ain’t Motown and they’ll be singing the blues.
You do understand that the spread in those curves between real median wages and the real gdp per person is labor productivity in our economy.
Not so. Labor productivity is real output per hour worked. It says nothing about wages. A good proxy that we have long term data for is real GDP/capita. The trendline in the graph below is a constant % improvement per year. You can see that over long time scales since the beginning of the industrial revolution, our progress in labor productivity has been remarkably consistent (currently ~$60k).
Wages are flat for a different reason. And we can't blame it on AI yet.
I've explained this numerous times in this forum. The bottom line is that the oligarchs found a way to divorce their fortunes from middle class prosperity, and have manipulated currency, trade, taxation, and fiscal management to do it. From their perspective, nothing has "gone wrong"... rather it has worked brilliantly and still is. IMO if a small group has enough power and influence to pull off something like this while 99% of the public is unaware of it, then our future with AI is dire indeed. https://www.city-data.com/forum/econ...verything.html
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