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Originally Posted by OhioJB
For a healthy economy you need a strong manufacturing base, something we've given away to many countries including communist China.
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The US has great difficulty competing globally.
Zenith and its union workers could not compete globally against South Korean LG (Life's Good) and its union workers. LG took the profits that it made globally and used them to buy Zenith stocks, until LG controlled 58% of Zenith. Zenith ended up in bankruptcy four years later, and LG paid $200 Million for Zenith, then dismantled Zenith's North American operations.
Zenith's union workers had the benefit of working at McDonald's or Wal-Mart.
The wages in other countries are not "slave wages." Those wages are wholly appropriate given their level of economic development, and in fact, Americans were paid the exact same wages when the US was at the exact same stage of economic development.
You'll just have to wait until the rest of the World catches up the US economically, and that's going to be a very long painful wait.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OhioJB
If war ever breaks out with them, which is not much of a stretch to think it could, will we even be able to produce our military hardware in the numbers we'd need to?
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There's not going to be a war.
The average Chinese would get impatient waiting for the US airlift troops to South Korea, which would take about 4-5 years, and any war would be long over by then.
It would take even longer to build enough troop transport ships, and it wouldn't matter, since Chinese diesel submarines are quite capable of evading US sonar and sinking most of them.
And, no, you're not going to attack China through the Himalayas from Afghanistan.
Keep fantasizing if you want to.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OhioJB
As for the unemployment there's no good way to come up with an accurate number. It is not even close to being as low as the government wants us to believe. Fall off the unemployment rolls, you no longer count and there's no way for the government to know who is still looking for work or who isn't but gave up looking because they knew there were no jobs available where they live.
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Yes, there is a way. It's called statistical analysis, and the government surveys 60,000 households each month to determine the employment situation.
People who haven't looked for work in the last 30 days prior to the survey are counted on the U-6.
There are 1,455,000 workers who looked for a job in the last 12 months, but not within the last month.
There are 378,000 workers who claim to be too discouraged to look for work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OhioJB
And of course we have millions of Americans who would love to work full-time but are relegated to part-time status because they can't find a full-time job.
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There are 1,542,000 workers who work a part-time job, because they can't find a full-time job.
That's 0.9% of the work-force.
20.3% of unemployed workers who have looked for a job in the last 30 days have been unemployed for 26 weeks or more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2sleepy
Maybe the stock market looks amazing because of all the stock buybacks?
They don't do much for wage growth but they sure pump up the value of stock in the short term
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Stock buy-backs protect a publicly-traded corporation from being bought up in a hostile take-over, forced merger or acquisition.
See the sad story of Zenith above.
See also Toys-R-Us, which didn't have enough cash to buy back its own stocks, so hostile investors bought up Toys-R-Us stocks, saddled the company with massive debt, then shut the company down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lieneke
The fall of Wall Street in 1929 did trigger a decade of depression,...
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No, it did not. Stock markets can never trigger recessions or depressions.
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