Musicmystery
Posts: 30259
Joined: 3/14/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: AnimusRex quote:
ORIGINAL: Sanity Cost cutting isn't happening where it needs to most, which is at the level of the federal government. The projected deficits are going to kill us. quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery Here's the thing. We HAVE, compared to the rest of the world, low corporate taxes, cheap energy, and so forth. And we also have, compared to the rest of the world, massive military spending. In FY 2010, the gov't received about 2 Trillion in revenue; it spent about 900 Billion on Defense/ Homeland Security. Meaning, almost 1/2 of every dollar you send to Washington is spent on some form of National Security. On a totally unrelated note, some historians contend that Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union by forcing them into an arms race which bankrupted them. Agreed. And massive is an understatement--we FAR exceed ALL other nations on military spending. It's time (long overdue, actually) to change our mindset to more realistic perceptions of the world, our place in it, and how to best address that reality (vs. nationalistic fantasy). This, despite the moral, militaristic, and economic policies of the Bush administration, is my largest beef. The overall mindset was a imperialistic fantasy that we just can't pull off--rich as we are (and we are, absolutely, still very, very rich), we just don't have the resources...let alone the capacity to deal with the consequences of those poorly planned positions. Business-wise, people overlook that while some overshore factors are less expensive--labor, for example, in some cases--we also have far superior infrastructure that makes the use of our resources cheaper and easier--including labor--because for many industries, productivity is higher, lowering overall cost. Some of our manufacturing, to illustrate, has been lost to European countries with higher wages and costs. It's about productivity. We're nowhere near bankruptcy or any of the other sky is falling scenarios floating around, as we do have massive reserves (and a wealth of natural resources), and fortunately, the wisdom not to squander those reserves over any given crisis du jour. But we are in a credit crunch nationally, and we do have to stop pretending paper equals resources. We've embraced market mechanisms so much that we mistake activity for production. We excel in many markets globally, including exclusively for some products. Yet we have a running huge trade deficit, and people want to "fix" our problems by closing borders to trade, thus closing ourselves off from a large portion of our markets. We have to stop reacting, and learn to think and plan long term. We have to stop reacting and complaining about how things are and were and should be and could have been, and produce. That's the very heart and soul of economics--value added production. Everything else is moving crap around. Everything else is excuses. Everything else is short term thinking, leaving long term problems to grow.
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