Are things about to get better or worse?

[tjmicsak]

Originally Posted by One_Four_Five

Bolds by me. I didn't vote becuase I think things will be the same for a little while before they get better.

I have to say I disagree with your view a little.

Your kids would be learning the value of the work ethic. I would call that major growth. Look at it like an investment. And if the kids spend the money wisely (as in not on drugs and alcohol), they will more than likely be discovering their interests and developing relationships with like minded people. I would call that major growth.

If you were to look at it as a household monetary loss, you may want to consider how greater the loss would be if they didn't grow, learn, and become responsible, and you had to support them into there 20's and 30's.

My definition of growth is to change the overall resource to expand it.
Over the years we have shifted from being producers to consumers.
That means we recieve product in and money goes out. Economy is the movement and flow of money and how that changes. That can't be illustrated more than to have a show like Pickers that begins to show objects as a defined value. It is really no wonder that Pawn Stars and Pickers is popular these days. Our money leaves the borders and we are left to define value now with what we have obtained in place of the real money itself.
Once we move back to being producers in place of consumers there are two things we can produce. Goods and Services.
Services are nice as they move the money around and in that way make the economy seem to grow. But that movement, just as in my exapmle of emplying my kids, will not change the overall growth of an economy because the vast majority of services stay within our borders. We can move and stir the soup, but the soup pot is not going to get any bigger overall.
When we produce GOODS we then can participate in TRADE outside our borders. That means we now move products out and have money coming in. If the value of that incoming money is then added to the soup pot, that soup pot gets bigger.
The benefit of doing that while other monies are a greater value than our dollar is that also adds to the net increase of the overall money pool circulating in our borders. The money from goods then serves to produce more services for us as well as more investment and new products within our borders. That is a growing economy. That is what we knew in the past and what we don't have today. Our actions is what has devalued our dollar. When we have no product that dollar represents to others it looses value.
Once we see that and move to address where the system is falling short things will get better.
Making/sponsering service jobs can help stir the production of product jobs to some limited extent, but nowhere near the effect that jobs producing goods and trade can overflow into creating service jobs.
That all hinges on the how much a service job requires materials that would be produced compared to that service itself.
Think of a guy who cleans carpets. He just needs cleaner and equipment, but the vast majority of his trade is in the service labor, not so much in support of the materials needed in the long run, whereas a guy who builds and sells guitars relies heavily on the materials from USCG and then those materials become what is provided to the consumer with some assembly. Those materials are the product moreso than his labor and represent a much greater weight of the end results value.
Goods will always build ecomony more than services because goods contribute to trade. Services are 90% "local" to our borders.
What we want to do overall here, just like a company, is to bring in new money that adds to our circulating flow. The term Buy USA is a start but is again only giving motion to what money we have within our borders, but as a nation we need to Sell USA so that goods leave and money comes in.
Making jobs is like buying USA goods and services, Making product is selling USA goods and services to others. Which method will bring in the new and additional outside money to our "company"?
The sadest part of it all is that most of the ideas and R&D for todays products started here but left. Education costs here are sky high but other countries sponsor and send their youth here to learn and bring back our education to those other countries more and more.
It would be nice if our main goal here was to provide every US citizen with that sort of education that would create ideas and industries here, and as a side benefit those jobs would also provide the benefits everone wants. We instead try to give everyone the benefits alone while our economy fails. We want fruit but don't want to plant the tree.
All we need to do is look back at what made this nation's economy grow in the past and how we had what we had. We need to look at the whole system and not just try to get a short term limited result that does not build the foundation for continued growth.

[rob2001]

^^^^^^In other words, compete with China and similar on a global scale?? Tough to do while paying a living U.S. wage.

[tjmicsak]

Originally Posted by rob2001

^^^^^^In other words, compete with China and similar on a global scale?? Tough to do while paying a living U.S. wage.

That is based on competition. We need new products that they don't have that overcomes that wage handicap. That was what we had in the past. We were the source. We were the patent holders. From simple products and ideas all the way up to nuclear science and NASA.
We had what others didn't or we had it first.
Those countries sponsor their youth to get educated here with our ideas then they leave with it.
Our own Universities profit from selling our economy to other countries every day.
They do that because those other countries sponsor and those students can then afford to pay what alot of us here can't.
We don't do that here for ourselves.
We don't sponsor R&D and Engineers to build our industry here.
We shoot ourselves in the foot and then complain we are limping along here.

[rob2001]

Originally Posted by tjmicsak

That is based on competition. We need new products that they don't have that overcomes that wage handicap. That was what we had in the past. We were the source. We were the patent holders. From simple products and ideas all the way up to nuclear science and NASA.
We had what others didn't or we had it first.
Those countries sponsor their youth to get educated here with our ideas then they leave with it.
Our own Universities profit from selling our economy to other countries every day.
They do that because those other countries sponsor and those students can then afford to pay what alot of us here can't.
We don't do that here for ourselves.
We don't sponsor R&D and Engineers to build our industry here.
We shoot ourselves in the foot and then complain we are limping along here.

That makes sense. I don't think we can compete directly with the rest of the world on the same products.

[hi-fi-dave]

Originally Posted by tjmicsak

That is based on competition. We need new products that they don't have that overcomes that wage handicap. That was what we had in the past. We were the source. We were the patent holders. From simple products and ideas all the way up to nuclear science and NASA.
We had what others didn't or we had it first.
Those countries sponsor their youth to get educated here with our ideas then they leave with it.
Our own Universities profit from selling our economy to other countries every day.
They do that because those other countries sponsor and those students can then afford to pay what alot of us here can't.
We don't do that here for ourselves.
We don't sponsor R&D and Engineers to build our industry here.
We shoot ourselves in the foot and then complain we are limping along here.

Sounds nice but your forgetting about the growing problem of industrial espionage. Big corporations put big dollars into research and development and then the information is stolen. Big companies are getting hacked into at an increasing rate and sensitive data is being increasingly taken electronically....... let alone the problems of other countries not enforcing patent laws.

How often do we hear about reverse engineering from other poorer, wage earning countries? They copy the design for someone else's investments and designs...then change the design a little bit and bang...making a product with much less cost for development and less employee wage expense. Hard to beat that formula but very little new innervation..... just a lot of copying.

[whiteop]

Stop watching TV and listening to the doom and gloom reports and you'll be a lot happier...that is all...

[rob2001]

Originally Posted by tjmicsak

That is based on competition. We need new products that they don't have that overcomes that wage handicap. That was what we had in the past. We were the source. We were the patent holders. From simple products and ideas all the way up to nuclear science and NASA.
We had what others didn't or we had it first.
Those countries sponsor their youth to get educated here with our ideas then they leave with it.
Our own Universities profit from selling our economy to other countries every day.
They do that because those other countries sponsor and those students can then afford to pay what alot of us here can't.
We don't do that here for ourselves.
We don't sponsor R&D and Engineers to build our industry here.
We shoot ourselves in the foot and then complain we are limping along here.

Just another thought on this....we may have had it first or were the only ones to have it, but that was largely because we smashed the rest of the world's ability to produce goods through war.

WW11 demolished Europe, Japan etc...there was no competition. 50 years following, we built an unsustainable society based on the assumption of no competition.

I can dig the idea of coming up with things no one else has, but I don't see that turning anything around.

[tjmicsak]

Originally Posted by rob2001

Just another thought on this....we may have had it first or were the only ones to have it, but that was largely because we smashed the rest of the world's ability to produce goods through war.

WW11 demolished Europe, Japan etc...there was no competition. 50 years following, we built an unsustainable society based on the assumption of no competition.

I can dig the idea of coming up with things no one else has, but I don't see that turning anything around.

You make great points and I fear they are quite true. But if that is the case and our growth after WWII was simply due to lack of competition, then we aren't really in a recession at all and the shrinking of our economy is simply a returning to "normalcy" that we have never known before.
But still what we do is not always the best things we could be doing to get a better place in competition.

[Pietro]

Uh...

Are we starting to get really close to politics?

[rob2001]

Originally Posted by Pietro

Uh...

Are we starting to get really close to politics?

Probably.....I'll chill.

[robbinsteele]

when i was younger-i always saw the glass half full,now that i'm older,that glass never seems half full-maybe cuz i'm wiser-haha

[Pietro]

Is the glass half empty?

Is the glass half full?

Or has the glass simply been designed to be twice as large as necessary for the task...

[hi-fi-dave]

Originally Posted by Pietro

Is the glass half empty?

Is the glass half full?

Or has the glass simply been designed to be twice as large as necessary for the task...

Very keen observation sir!

[Shake]

Originally Posted by Halfbiscuit

Better for some, worse for others.

Better for a very small number of folks.
Much, much worse for the rest of us.

[tiktok]

Better for me, worse for my vassals.