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Manufacturing jobs going overseas was the first thing. That did not happen during the Bush Administration. Go back to that point and then watch everything that's happened since then. We need to get those manufacturing jobs back here, and we do not need the factories owned by China, which is the way it's going now.
Everybody needs to get their heads out of where they are and back into the sunlight.
Unlike the 50's where the U.S. was the only game in town, beginning in the mid 60's the U.S. had to compete in the global market. Steel was the first big outsource. Domestic and global markets were not willing to pay a premium for steel manufactured in the U.S. by workers who had been lifted into middle-class by their union and government.
Manufacturing is booming in the U.S. but it's not your daddy's factory. Technology means substantially fewer people are needed to man these factories and those people need training and education.
To put this into perspective, imagine how many people have been displaced because of a new fangled invention called the tractor in the mid 1800's.
Unlike the 50's where the U.S. was the only game in town, beginning in the mid 60's the U.S. had to compete in the global market. Steel was the first big outsource. Domestic and global markets were not willing to pay a premium for steel manufactured in the U.S. by workers who had been lifted into middle-class by their union and government.
Manufacturing is booming in the U.S. but it's not your daddy's factory. Technology means substantially fewer people are needed to man these factories and those people need training and education.
To put this into perspective, imagine how many people have been displaced because of a new fangled invention called the tractor in the mid 1800's.
Except that this isn't any more true than when you posted it before. This is where I previously debunked it:
The economy was destroyed by everyday Americans who bought things they could not afford. That, and Bush putting a $1 trillion war in Iraq on a Chinese credit card were the chief culprits. Eventually, the bills become due.
Nobody put a gun to someone's head and forced them to sign on the dotted line for a loan they could not pay back. Blaming the government, Wall Street, or "big banks" is simply the easy way out.
Who was buying up mortgages, and getting bonuses, and bundling them off with an A++++ approval rating, Fannie MAE and Freddie MAC. Repealing Glass-Steagal allowed commercial and investment banks to merge, e.g. Citi Group, and many other bad legislative decisions back in the late 1990s all came together to bring down our economy.
But not to worry, we bailed them out, and the Fed is pumping in $85 billion a month to continue to bail them out, and the top priority in government is amnesty legislation for illegal immigrants, so it's all okay now.
That just simply isn't true. Back in 2000, FNMA had programs allowing lenders to accept "alternative" documentation for loan approval. How can unverifiable documentation be anything but subprime?Case Study: Countrywide Home Loans, Inc.
published by Fannie Mae Foundation, 2000 http://www.truthandcommonsense.org/d...eckleneess.pdf
That, incidentally, is exactly why Mozilo only got a very minor handslap in the Countrywide debacle. The federal government itself was explicitly complicit in whatever "crimes" Mozilo appears to have committed.
No/low doc loans have been around for decades and were designed to primarily allow the self-employed and those employed seasonally to buy a home. Such loans carried a higher interest rate than fully documented loans to offset the lender's risk.
Going back to the early 90's FNMA/FHLMC ceased buying these loans unless the buyers had a minimum of a 30% down payment. This did not prevent lenders from continuing to make such loans and selling them to Wall Street as a conduit for investors willing to accept a higher risk of default in exchange for a higher ROI.
But when the rest of the world was in chaos, after WWII, we were the only game in town. We could afford to pay workers more, to create crappy manufactured goods, because the world had little choice but to just buy it all. then we had the USSR which further depressed every nation it ruled over, including half of Germany.
Once foreign markets got their legs under them, and started to compete with the US, our days of paying high wages and making crappy cars that rusted out or broke down after the 12 month or 12,000 mile warranty expired, came to a screeching halt. Once the USSR imploded, those countries started to create their own products for sale, and then India and China start catching up.
But when the rest of the world was in chaos, after WWII, we were the only game in town. We could afford to pay workers more, to create crappy manufactured goods, because the world had little choice but to just buy it all. then we had the USSR which further depressed every nation it ruled over, including half of Germany.
Once foreign markets got their legs under them, and started to compete with the US, our days of paying high wages and making crappy cars that rusted out or broke down after the 12 month or 12,000 mile warranty expired, came to a screeching halt. Once the USSR imploded, those countries started to create their own products for sale, and then India and China start catching up.
As the link said:
Quote:
Sorry, guys, but that’s bad history and very bad economics.
On the history: the great postwar boom wasn’t just a few years after the war; it was a whole generation long, from 1947 to 1973 — well into an era in which Europe had very much recovered. Here’s West German GDP per capita as a share of US GDP per capita:
The Europe-in-ruins era was long over while the US boom was still going strong.
But the bad history is incidental; the really key point is that this is nonsense economics. Yes, our competitors were in ruins for a while; so were our customers (who were more or less the same countries). Basically, we had nobody to trade with. Here’s exports and imports as a percentage of US GDP:
The reality, of course, is that what share of the pie workers got was being diverted to capital owners -- even though U.S. productivity was rising:
Bush spent? You mean Congress right? The president can sign it but it is congress who writes it.
Both party's are equally to blame and still are. Look no further than the pork packages of the last 6 years.
Pork can be traced back to the very beginning. One can say the U.S. was founded on the basis of pork. It's likely that no bill would ever pass in absence of pork to grease the wheels. It's the American way.
No doubt about it, adding the pork is bipartisan stuff. That it can be added anonymously should sicken everyone.
The reality, of course, is that what share of the pie workers got was being diverted to capital owners -- even though U.S. productivity was rising:
...and???
I'm old enough to remember the cars GM and Ford were building back in the 1960s-1980s, they came with 12 month warranties, and were so bad we had to write lemon laws to protect consumers. It was not until competition from Japan and Europe started to surface in the late 70s early 80s, that we were no longer the only game in town. Twenty years later the combination of a greedy UAW and foreign auto manufacturing competition saw the collapse of all of GM.
Barney Frank's immortal quote ('I want to roll the dice as it applies to this subsidized housing situation') succinctly summarizes which party was responsible for the housing crash; start with Clinton, Reno, Holder, Johnson, Waters, Schumer and all the rest who finally put some teeth into Jimmy The Peanut Farmer's 17-year old Community Redevelopment Act in 1994, and repeatedly lowered underwriting standards to reach their desired quotas.
The best explanation of the housing crash came from Thomas Sowell's 'The Housing Boom And Bust', and the Democrats were totally responsible as he meticulously explained.
Furthermore, Holder & Obama are STILL pushing subprime loans, as IBD reported recently.
Redlining is yet another 'crime' that only exists in the mind of Democrats such as Obama, who filed lawsuits against Citibank during his community organizer' gig in 1995 as the Chicago newspapers reported.
Democrats talk about discrimination nonstop and have for ages, but when you ask them why as Dr. Sowell has repeatedly pointed out, that whites are TWICE as likely to get rejected for mortgages as Asians are but that NOBODY considers that to be discrimination, Democrats wind up with a terrible case of lockjaw!!!!
Hypocrisy and stupidity at the same time--typical Democrat behavior.
Just how many of those "two-thirds" who "own" homes actually "own" them? How is it possible that so many people who "owned" homes, lost them to banks/lending institutions? If you are paying off a mortgage to a bank/lending institution, you don't own that home, the bank/institution owns it, not the mortgage holder.
The number has been declining because even those with paid off homes increasingly tend to have home equity loans. As the Baby Boom ages, Reverse Mortgages will likely become more common, too.
Home equity loans seriously goosed the economy in the 2000's because people used their equity to live beyond their means.
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