FinanceDude
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2006
- Messages
- 12,483
Well, we are fighting two wars. That takes a lot of logistics and support.
Don't forget the war on illegal immigration!
Or the war on the idle rich, the war on poverty, or the war on the middle class.
We should have a war on wars...
Blame the robots.
By STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
So if I read the tables correctly, manufacturing dropped off a cliff. State and local government, as well as government health care really took off.
, 0%'s are very misleading and should be blanks since there was no data),
The big take away is that manufacturing will be gone completely in 20 years and colleges+health care will be sucking in 30% of the economy quite soon in manufacturings place.
Why do you say specifically government health care? The fact that the category immediately before "health care" is "Private services except health care" suggests to me that this category refers to private employment in health care, and that "government health care", is included in the Local, State and Federal percentages. Either that, or the health care percentage includes both government and private employment.So if I read the tables correctly, manufacturing dropped off a cliff. State and local government, as well as government health care really took off.
But the Chinese are holding oodles of U.S. debt. If they didn't like the tariff couldn't they retaliate by refusing to lend us any more money? I sometimes wonder if the economic situation between the US and China is analogous to the past military situation with the US and USSR, with Mutual Assured Destruction if either side attacks the other—the only way to avoid catastrophe is for neither side to strike first.The OP links to an article in the WSJ which beginsBy STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
IF that's a problem, what might we do about it? The first thing that comes to my mind is that it's hard to have "free trade" when one side is manipulating its currency, so maybe we should have put a small tariff on Chinese goods, just enough to offset the currency peg. I'll bet the WSJ and this author would be up in arms against any such suggestion.
There's the old saying: " “If you loan a man a dollar, he's your servant… loan him a million dollars and you're his slave.” The Chinese have loaned us enough that they won't want to do anything that would adversely affect our ability to repay them.But the Chinese are holding oodles of U.S. debt. If they didn't like the tariff couldn't they retaliate by refusing to lend us any more money?
That's what I meant by "Mutual Assured Destruction". If we do something the Chinese don't like and they attack us economically they would at the same time be destroying their biggest customer—or vice versa. However it might start, it's a fight that China and the US would both lose, and I suspect it would trash other countries economically at the same time, just as a nuclear war between the US and the USSR would have destroyed the rest of the world along with us.There's the old saying: " “If you loan a man a dollar, he's your servant… loan him a million dollars and you're his slave.” The Chinese have loaned us enough that they won't want to do anything that would adversely affect our ability to repay them.
But the Chinese are holding oodles of U.S. debt. If they didn't like the tariff couldn't they retaliate by refusing to lend us any more money? I sometimes wonder if the economic situation between the US and China is analogous to the past military situation with the US and USSR, with Mutual Assured Destruction if either side attacks the other—the only way to avoid catastrophe is for neither side to strike first.
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