What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[Saint Peter]

Did you work second at the chicken nuggets plant?

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I wear my weasel hunting hat at night, so I can see . . .



which tree the 'coons climbed.



My raccoon neighbor may get a t-giving gift from the church folks across the alley.



He always passes on the load of used cat litter in my bins.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We no longer have small visitors, just very amused deer...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Thank Gawd the deerz leave us alone . . . for the time being.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

They're no bother, just venison on the hoof...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Ghost of the Gateway
Geoffrey P. Hunt

In western New York State, near the village of Lyons, the seat of Wayne County some twenty miles south of Lake Ontario and east of Rochester, lies a shallow waterway. Threading its way from a rural crossroads known as Pilgrimport, around drumlins and across farmland to Canal Street, what remains is barely a hint of a once-famous gateway to the west.

This neglected and long-abandoned original route of "Clinton's Ditch" is now nearly filled in and overgrown with willows and silver maples. Not many know, and fewer care, about an obscure backcountry towpath. But it enabled the sweeping destiny of American industry and the means to this nation's economic ascendancy.

The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, was first championed by the relentless entrepreneur Jesse Howley, who wrote several persuasive tracts advocating such a venture from debtor's prison in western New York. President Monroe showed little enthusiasm for the federal government sponsoring such an epic project, as he believed that the feds had no constitutional authority to pay for it. But Monroe didn't try to block it; indeed, its construction commenced during his first term.

Instead, the Erie Canal became the hobbyhorse of Governor DeWitt Clinton. Underwritten to the tune of $7 million by the New York State Legislature, the Canal traversed the only geologically navigable break through the Appalachian mountain chain from the eastern seaboard to the west. It opened the upper Great Lakes to cost-efficient commerce -- dropping transportation costs instantly by 90% -- and established New York City as Gotham of North America.

The Canal brought thousands of immigrants and settlers to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, unifying the frontier lands of the upper Midwest with the established Mid-Atlantic and New England states. The Erie Canal was the stimulus for American industry in the decades preceding the Civil War, without which the Union states could never have defeated the Confederacy -- and, by the way, ended slavery. If the Erie Canal were proposed today, it could never be built. Not a chance.

Not a single shovel of earth would have been lifted, prevented by decades of hopeless delays and diversions from environmental impact studies along with Clean Water Act and Wetlands Protection Act litigation. Environmentalists would have obstructed the Erie Canal, and all of the subsequent railroads following its Water Level route, later consolidated into the New York Central Railroad. Cornelius Vanderbilt's would-be fortune would have been soaked up by lawyers fighting court injunctions.

At least Vanderbilt would've had nothing to fear from competitors. The excavation, blasting, and streambed re-channeling through the Alleghenies, necessary to build the Pennsylvania Railroad, would have been equally stymied.

Coalfields in Pennsylvania and West Virginia along with the north/south railroads necessary to carry coal to Great Lakes steel furnaces from Buffalo to Chicago would remain untouchable. Permits to dig iron ore from the open pit deposits in Minnesota's Mesabi Range would be denied.

The perfected vision of today's liberal elites, the virgin undisturbed garden, would have been America's destiny. And the agrarian southern states would have been able to keep slavery alive perhaps through the beginning of the 20th century.

Government-enabled infrastructure projects for over 150 years -- spanning the Erie Canal, lighthouses, railroads, hydroelectric power, and the interstate highway system -- all had three common features: they reduced costs, invited more industry and commerce, and opened new markets, while advancing the socio-economic fortunes of all Americans.

When is the last time a new interstate highway was constructed? How about an interstate high voltage power transmission line? How about an oil and gas pipeline? Witness the obstacles thrown in the path of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Houston and Port Arthur. Or the assault on coal production, sanctions against deep-water oil and gas drilling, and the hysteria over new natural gas extraction methods in New York and Pennsylvania.

The economic domination of the United States can be tracked along the three pillars of technology: 1) transportation (canals and railroads), 2) energy (coal to fuel locomotives, mining equipment, steelmaking and meta-forging, and later oil for piston-driven engines and petrochemicals), and 3) steelmaking.

For all their jabberwocky about jobs and economic growth, captive to that liberal progressive fantasy where capital is both unnecessary and evil, and now intimidated by the relentless environmental lobby, Democrats have declared war on industry. The central campaign in the war on industry, run from the Obama White House, has been the assault on cheap, abundant, and reliable energy production, a requirement for any kind of economic resiliency and growth.

Instead, taxpayer subsidies are siphoned for green energy boondoggles. Billions of dollars are now diverted to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels -- none of which have any broad based application. None of these have the breadth of reliability or reach to have any economic impact. All of them carry increased costs to users and crowd out dwindling public resources for legitimate projects. And all of them have vacuumed some tens of billions of dollars from thinning taxpayers' wallets, rewarding Obama campaign contributors and rent-seeking leeches.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/ghost_of_the_gateway.html#ixzz1ed64Hx2Q

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The 1979 book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, by East Asia scholar Ezra Vogel, stoked fears that the United States was about to be outcompeted by the land of the rising sun. And why not? The U.S. had just suffered through a decade of stagflation and was about to enter what was then the worst recession since the Great Depression. By the late 1980s, the case seemed ironclad. “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history,” wrote Robert Kuttner, then the economics correspondent for The New Republic, in the Los Angeles Times in May 1988. Evidence for this decline and fall? “The total value of stocks listed on the Tokyo stock exchange is now $3.54 trillion dollars, compared to $2.34 trillion for the New York Stock Exchange.”

In his 1988 book Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It, former Reagan administration trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz warned, “The power behind the Japanese juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for Japan has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

Two decades later, we know that the panic over Japanese economic competition was greatly exaggerated. Today the total value of the New York Stock Exchange is nearly three times that of Tokyo’s. Japan is not Number One. In fact, as of last year it became Number Three, behind China.

Twenty-five years ago, Japanophobes (or should they be called Japanophiles?) were fretting about the differential economic growth rates of the United States and Japan. At times in the 1980s, Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) was growing at nearly 10 percent per year, whereas American GDP was increasing at a merely respectable 4 percent. (All figures are unadjusted for inflation.) Had the growth rates continued at those levels after 1988, Japan’s overall economy would have caught up to ours within 10 years.

Instead, the Japanese financial bubble burst. In 2011 the country’s GDP in current dollars is $5.5 trillion, compared to the American total of nearly $15 trillion. Per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power, a measure of what it costs to purchase similar baskets of goods and services among countries) for Japan is $34,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans. Japan has suffered through two decades of stagflation, and you no longer hear anyone recommending that the U.S. adopt Japanese-style top-down industrial policy as an economic panacea.

So now comes China. “We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

But it is unlikely that China’s economy can sustain 10 percent annual growth for two more decades. Economic history suggests that once countries catch up with leading economies in terms of technologies and business management, growth slows down. Consider what would happen if Chinese growth slows to 5 percent. Assuming sustained respective 5 percent and 3 percent growth rates for China and the U.S. for the next two decades, China’s total GDP would reach just $16 trillion, not $34 trillion. In 30 years, it would grow to $26 trillion, by which time U.S. GDP would be $36 trillion. In 40 years, China’s GDP would be $42 trillion, compared to our $49 trillion. All in all, it would take China a half-century to catch up.

Just to be clear: Anyone who thinks that they know what purchasing power parity might be between any two countries by 2060 is seriously deluded. Calculations like these—mine and Goldman Sachs’—can only provide rough possible scenarios for the economic future.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that U.S. growth will remain steady at 3 percent. As the recent history of Japan shows, it is possible to adopt economic policies that produce decades’ worth of economic stagnation. In that case, China’s GDP may well surpass ours sooner rather than later, although perhaps not for the reasons alarmists predict.*

Then again, China has already picked most of the low-hanging fruit, economically speaking. Future productivity increases will not come from merely copying technologies developed in other advanced countries. Furthermore, continued rapid growth depends on the kind of innovative management that can thrive only in open societies. Unless China makes the transition to an open society, its future is not growth but stagnation and political disillusionment. And if it does make that transition, then China will be a partner, not a rival.

Ronald Bailey
http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/24/china-derangement-syndrome


* THANK YOU PRESIDENT OBAMA!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The displacement of the “individual” as a primary category of social and political thought — a distinctly observable trend in the contemporary West — is an infallible sign of civilizational despair. The nexus of causes and factors accounting for this undeniable phenomenon has been analyzed in many different ways and from many different perspectives: the draining of confidence in the “Western enterprise” after two world wars and the devastation of the generations; the natural tendency of a successful civilization to grow tired and lazy in the course of aeonian time, as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee argued in their major works; the loss of religious conviction and its attendant moral armature, leading to rootless insecurity and lack of transcendent purpose; the attenuation of historical memory — what I have elsewhere called the chronosectomy — owing to a dumbed-down education paradigm and the consequent onset of a present-oriented hedonism. Perhaps all of these factors are coterminous and work together against the sense of individual responsibility for self, family, and nation. But whatever may explain our predicament, there can be little doubt that, despite all our technical advances, we are experiencing something like the advent of a new Dark Age.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-individual/?singlepage=true

 

[patrick1]

The average middle-class person in Japan. north America or Europe is richer than most rich people in history, and likely to be richer than most future rich people - as we are wasting so many irretrievable natural resources. We just need to manage what we do better. That's how I see it.

Patrick

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Ghost of the Gateway
Geoffrey P. Hunt




Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/ghost_of_the_gateway.html#ixzz1ed64Hx2Q

Ronald Bailey
http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/24/china-derangement-syndrome


* THANK YOU PRESIDENT OBAMA!

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-individual/?singlepage=true

Your usual well balanced sources..

Reason? Right.
Thinker? Far Right.
PJMedia? Fucking Whacko Right Blog site. Dizzybooby's old "goto".

So much for Cap'n "Diversity of thought" huh?

You've moved into Dizzybooby's old far right slot and he's moved permanently into fascist "racism is fun" mode. Although you've been getting accustomed to tossing around racial epithets. Prepping for the inevitable shift even further right I guess.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

In other news..

The average Bush tax cut for the 1% this year ($66,384) will be greater than the average income of the other 99% ($58,506)

“The super committee failed to grapple with the extraordinarily costly Bush tax cuts for the richest—tax policies that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost more in added federal debt than they add in additional economic activity,” explained Jo Comerford, NPP’s Executive Director. Frank Knapp, vice chairman of the American Sustainable Business Council, added in a statement yesterday, “the high-end Bush tax cuts are a big part of the problem – not the solution…It’s obscene to keep slashing infrastructure and services for everybody on Main Street to keep up tax giveaways for millionaires and multinational corporations.”

The Bush tax cuts have done nothing expand the federal debt and give billions in tax breaks to those who needed them least. Past grand bargains when it came to the budget included substantial new revenues, to balance the pain of getting the country’s budget in order. Instead of adopting that approach, the GOP wants to continue lavishing tax breaks onto the 1%, while asking everyone else to sacrifice.

 

[eyer]

Looks like Butterball survived another TDay...

 

[Beco]

Watching the Republican debate now....Wolf Blitzer makes me nauseous

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The average Bush tax cut for the 1% this year ($66,384) will be greater than the average income of the other 99% ($58,506)

“The super committee failed to grapple with the extraordinarily costly Bush tax cuts for the richest—tax policies that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost more in added federal debt than they add in additional economic activity,” explained Jo Comerford, NPP’s Executive Director. Frank Knapp, vice chairman of the American Sustainable Business Council, added in a statement yesterday, “the high-end Bush tax cuts are a big part of the problem – not the solution…It’s obscene to keep slashing infrastructure and services for everybody on Main Street to keep up tax giveaways for millionaires and multinational corporations.”

The Bush tax cuts have done nothing expand the federal debt and give billions in tax breaks to those who needed them least. Past grand bargains when it came to the budget included substantial new revenues, to balance the pain of getting the country’s budget in order. Instead of adopting that approach, the GOP wants to continue lavishing tax breaks onto the 1%, while asking everyone else to sacrifice.

*chuckle*

Fair, balanced, objective and wrong...

We BORROWED a TRILLION dollars...

... to keep unemployment under 8%!

*rimshot*

That "tax on the wealthy" won't even cover the vig...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Watching the Republican debate now....Wolf Blitzer makes me nauseous

My first name's Mitt!



Way to go Willard! lol

 

[busybody..]

*chuckle*

Fair, balanced, objective and wrong...

We BORROWED a TRILLION dollars...

... to keep unemployment under 8%!

*rimshot*

That "tax on the wealthy" won't even cover the vig...

If what NIGGER UD copied is true

That means

When NIGGER HO! Fought so hard to keep it.............he is intent on hurting the cuntry

How can NIGGER UD support him?

Must mean NIGGER UD wants to hurt the cuntry as well

No?

Yes!

Axe him

I am too low class to be read

I am too low class to be read

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

If what NIGGER UD copied is true

That means

When NIGGER HO! Fought so hard to keep it.............he is intent on hurting the cuntry

How can NIGGER UD support him?

Must mean NIGGER UD wants to hurt the cuntry as well

No?

Yes!

Axe him

I am too low class to be read

I am too low class to be read

But busybody, the rich are the ones who financed his campaign along with Solyndra and BP and PayGo is the law of the Obamanation!

 

[fair_warning]

Fuck I hate people quoting BB.
I have him on ignore...quoting BB is just plain nasty.

 

[busybody..]

Fuck I hate people quoting BB.
I have him on ignore...quoting BB is just plain nasty.

fuck off

 

[Saint Peter]

Old Today, 07:01 AM
doucheybaggy
This message is hidden because doucheybaggy is on your ignore list.

 

[koalabear]

Stocks shake off European debt fears, stage dramatic comeback......

DOW 11,266.94 +9.39


http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?Symbol=$us:INDU&width=300&height=200&E1=0&D4=1&Legend=0&AF=2&Banner=5&palette=2&C1=3&E8=1

 

[busybody..]

Loser Clown

 

[eyer]

DOW 11,266.94 +9.39


http://data.moneycentral.msn.com/scripts/chrtsrv.dll?Symbol=$us:INDU&width=300&height=200&E1=0&D4=1&Legend=0&AF=2&Banner=5&palette=2&C1=3&E8=1

Looks like the market comes back from reality - quality time spent with family, friends on a great American holiday - recharged with optimism and refilled with good cheer...

...and then grasps a economic/political/cultural view of what's still happening in the material world out there and losses its lunch.

 

[koalabear]

Looks like the market comes back from reality - quality time spent with family, friends on a great American holiday - recharged with optimism and refilled with good cheer...

...and then grasps a economic/political/cultural view of what's still happening in the material world out there and losses its lunch.

I blame the giblets.