http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090602_geography_recession

The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why.

Let’s begin with some simple numbers.

As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world.

Interesting ideas there.

It's all moot if the dollar fails though (which seems more and more likely all the time).

Do you think our diversity (sp) in various economic endevours actually holds us up better than most?

'and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. '

- ...Really? Infact, the impact of the recession on economies like the French one pales in comparison to what has happened in the US. Sub-prime, anyone? GM in the toilet. More banks than you can sniff at. I would say it has hit America very, very hard. Harder than most places.

Did you not read the article?

No flying brooms.

In any case, there are differing opinions about how bad it really is. Certain macroeconomic indicators will tell you that it really isn't all that bad, but in my view that's something of a mischaracterization. However, the article's basic point, that the US has a very large natural advantage over most of the rest of the world, particularly when related to our population density, is largely correct and borne out by a lot more than just recession resilience. The other side of that is that our standard of living has the furthest to fall.

The US is perhaps the only place on earth that is really capable of going back to isolationism on a food and energy basis.

The US is perhaps the only place on earth that is really capable of going back to isolationism on a food and energy basis.

Food?, yes... Energy? Negative.

The U.S. is a net importer of energy (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/northamerica/engsupp.htm). These stats are a few years old but the pattern is there, the U.S. needs to import energy from its neighbours to sustain the status quo.

If you worded it like this then I would agree:

North America is perhaps the only place on earth that is really capable of going back to isolationism on a food and energy basis.


Cheers,

We have large gas, coal, and uranium reserves that we choose not to utilize because it is cheaper to export the supply-end problems of mining and extraction to brown people (or Canadians). We are a net importer because it is advantageous, not because it is necessary. And I did specify energy and not oil for a reason, oil is about the only major resource we have locally exhausted.

I would agree that the US/Canada in aggregate are better off than either alone, but that's not really the point. When you're looking at what is a problem versus an inconvenience, the States don't have a lot of natural problems.

I think a modern isolationist American would include our friends to the North and South anyway.

Incredibly informative, I especially liked the section on China.

There is something just not quite right in that article...over simplified and seems to either ignore or overlook a few important things.

As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world.

Is the statement I take some issue with. While I think the comparisons to the Great Depression are premature and alarmist, the fundamental problems going on now are far worse than the talking heads are letting on, possibly because they themselves simply do not understand either.

The unemployment rates, particularly given we've been aggressively delisting whole classes of the unemployed out of those statistics, and specifically who is unemployed, heavily biased towards blue-collar men, paints a picture of much more severe, systemic problems than a bunch of mutally fellating stock brokers bitching about mortgages.

Aside from that, the debt to value, personal savings, and non-home asset numbers are a) much worse than they were in the 80s and b) not getting better.

Yes, it seems to overlook the disastrous fiscal calamity caused by certain contractions in the *US* economy that started this plunge.

To suggest the US could feesably return to complete economic and subsistence isolationism is economics and geo-politics for the retarded.

And I did specify energy and not oil for a reason, oil is about the only major resource we have locally exhausted.



Well, don't forget about all that oil up in Anwar. I'm sure there are plenty of places like that in Alaska, that we don't even know about, simply because they are so remote.

I'm thinking if isolationism is the rule of thumb, then a method to get to the remote oil would be forthcoming.

ANWR's reserves are insignificant compared to our current usage, and insignificant compared to the uranium and coal reserves we'd be tapping in to if we cut oil imports as well. That particular issue is largely the maneuvering of oil and gas companies and has little real long-term benefit.

Besides Sixee.. who cares about oil in remote hard to get to places.

Remote and hard to get to = more expensive. Removing its cheap-factor, oil has no particular advantage over any other source of energy.

Remote and hard to get to = more expensive. Removing its cheap-factor, oil has no particular advantage over any other source of energy.

Oil has the advantage of being a liquid, thus, easily portable in smaller volumes and easier to engineer around. You can run a car on coal bricks, but not an airplane.

The old adage is correct in proclaiming that when the US gets a cold, the world catches a flu. I agree that much of China's natural resources are very difficult to use or refine, and the US has the clear advantage in being self-sufficient. The shear size of the US allows the country to generate jobs in a recession, and Mr Obama's desire to improve transport and telecom infrastructure is a boon by means of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 (however, his decision to allow GM to lapse into bankruptcy and then take 60% of the shares of GM is best characterized as idiocy, which I do have a share of four-letter choice words I would have liked to throw at him).

The US needs a new lease of life, and improvements in US infrastructure is working towards that goal. My company was recently awarded a tender by a certain governmental agency to construct a new long-haul fiber optic network. Land-challenged countries, such as Japan, do not have the same opportunity to generate internal jobs (demonstrated by a trade surplus).

China has been given many opportunities of purchasing US properties and companies, so I don't doubt that they are preparing themselves to be sustainable (Hummer's purchase by Sichuan company).

Nevertheless, the US is on a collision course with capitalism and national interest. Natural resources are to the advantage of the US, but--in the grand scheme of things--as the Chinese purchase more and more US properties, it really questions the idea if there is a single economy, which economists have answered with a resounding "no."

I think a few of you didn't read the article before complaining. It purposely ignores a multitude of other issues, to focus on geographical factors. It's not presenting itself as a complete picture of the broader situation.

Think Guns, Germs, and Steel written about the present. Nothing more.

The message about 'how good we have it' is looking strictly at a geographic feature that *isn't even used that much* in the US anymore as a proportion of intra-national commerce, namely shipping using the Mississippi river system. It's interesting from a historical perspective, and as an illumination of one of the basic underlying pillars of historical American prosperity, but overlooks the fact that ease of intranational shipping of goods is largely irrelevant to this crisis as our agriculture is overwhelmingly owned by enormous agribusiness conglomerates anyway which employ few people and ship most of the proceeds out of the country, and we no longer ship material goods intranationally for domestic processing in any case, but send the raw materials overseas to have them manufactured and then shipped back to this country as finished goods.

Certainly, if both the corporatocracy and international commerce broke down, the US would be in much better shape than much of the rest of the world from a raw resources standpoint, and would theoretically be able to survive isolation in a basic material sense better; but in the context of the current recession all that arable land and those navigable waterways are largely insignificant as 1) they employ few workers and 2) control of that arable land/mining/oil interests is largely not in the hands of either individuals *or* the state but rather international agribusiness (and in the west, mining) conglomerates who are happy to sell to the highest bidder.

As we speak, Austrailia, having gotten the chills with regard to how much of their self-determination they were willing to sell, just declined, at great cost to themselves, a bid by China to buy much of their Rio Tinto mining conglomerate, which would have been China's largest investment in a foreign conglomerate to date: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8084350.stm

Australia has, in recent years, been tarred as being somewhat xenophobic in its dealings with other Asian nations, but in this case the deal would have given China a substantial lever with which to set iron ore prices globally and my personal feeling is that Rio Tinto was wise not to accept the deal even if that decision was made on more of an immediately pragmatic (commodities prices rising) basis.

This is running long as usual but my point is that in the modern world, where *where* a resource is is much less important than who owns it, our geographic blessings may not mean much to our own country or its prosperity if the proceeds from those mines/fields/etc are owned by someone else or other countries can use that ownership to set prices which are punitive to Americans, either from a cost or employment perspective. Indeed, we are starting to see, on a large scale, not only the outsourcing of American jobs, but the outsourcing of interests in American extraction and agricultural industries and the selling of basic land rights themselves. Granted, we lag behind South America in this, but my point is that just because we *sit* on these vast resources does not mean, in the final analysis, that we will end up being the ultimate beneficiaries of them.

Regards,
Nydia

Also, I just got a big giggle reading the 'who we are' page for STRATFOR (the world leader in global intelligence, no less!) and even the name makes me chuckle soaked in that military macho-sounding acronymese. I'd love to know whether they have a bunker attached to that think tank and what percentage of their 'folks all over the world' have connections to the military-no-bid-complex ;)...

Regards,
Nydia

Nydia, you've hit the nail on one of my points. China realises that it isn't as blessed with resources as the US (the "New" world) is. In a bid to stake a claim to these resources, you have now witnessed Chinese companies trying to stock up on US real properties and geographical resources. We may possess the resources, but we may not end up being the end beneficiary.

How is the US trying to suppress this? We've attempted, for example, to stop the purchase of 3Com by voiding the sale to Huawei in the name of "security for the public." Eventually, we may start a trade war with China, or a full-scale war with blood, and ignore all rules of capitalism for the sake of nationalism and "dignity," because we can't let the fear of a yellow planet propagate.

We could just implement laws like sane countries that prevent large-scale foreign ownership of land and businesses .. this is one of those cases of our neoliberalism evangelists forgetting that they shouldn't believe the lies they tell South America.


The message about 'how good we have it' is looking strictly at a geographic feature that *isn't even used that much* in the US anymore as a proportion of intra-national commerce, namely shipping using the Mississippi river system.

But it can be, meaning the event we have a total trade collapse, we still have means to efficiently move food around; less drastically, it also means that we have a much more adaptable economic position, so individual crises aren't as bad for us.

ignore all rules of capitalism for the sake of nationalism and "dignity," because we can't let the fear of a yellow planet propagate.

A couple of things about this. I don't think most intelligent people's concerns about Chinese influence stem from issues related with race as they do with the global rise of authoritarianism (which makes it difficult for democratic or more environmentally conscious regimes, for example, to hold to their own policies and ideals in the wake of growing economically-weighted political pressure not to anger China's ruling regime), although it may well be that race/culture ends up being used as a lever to manipulate public opinion as it wouldn't be seemly to break one of the major tenets of the Church of the Free Market. On the 'rules of capitalism' issue, a strong case could be made that China has been ignoring, or rather gaming, those 'rules of capitalism' for some time via artificially keeping the value of the yuan low, state ownership and control of 'private' industries, failing to verify or regulate supply chains, etc (although I won't lump environmental degradation, price controls, and worker exploitation into this category as many non-authoritarian regimes, including us, do these things as well). If we're going to use 'nationalism as impetus for a trade war', a strong case can be made that China has been aggressively doing just that for the past 20 years - the difference being a matter of approach.

I personally hope that we see *do* some meaningful protectionism enacted beyond the symbolic and possibly counterproductive (the horse has long left the barn) 'Buy American' provision in the latest stimulus bill; reconstituting American industrial infrastructure is going to require not just investment, but supports and, yes, economic protection for those industries as we get them back off the ground (and before any of you mention the bloated carcass that is GM as a lame example of why protectionism is bad, keep in mind that they via their own arrogance and greed did that to themselves rather spectacularly). It's time we as American citizens ask ourselves whether being an 'ownership society' means we are willing to accept 'being owned' by a multinational corporate class that is not beholden to *any* state, or to an authoritarian one, or whether we might want to rethink blindly following the religion of capitalism to its absurd end.

We needn't start a nationalistic or trade war off in order to start enacting some sane trade policy in the US; but there's no question that we will have to piss off a few of our domestic *and* foreign looters. Interestingly, I think an important bellweather with regard to whether or not we have the will to reclaim our power of political self-determination from the lootocrats is upon us not on the international trade front, but with the health care crisis and debate currently before us.

Regards,
Nydia

One-third of our manufacturing jobs have disappeared in a decade! And while population grew 12.1 percent over the decade, jobs grew by only 6.4 percent. The unemployment number, moreover, doesn't count those who are "marginally attached to the labor force," because even though they want to work and are available to do so, they have not sought a job in the past four weeks. In raw numbers, the total number of individuals counted as currently unemployed and those who are marginally attached is a staggering 15.8 million. That is an enormous mountain of job creation to climb.

Natural resources are great ... if we're utilizing them.

http://www.slate.com/id/2219599/

http://www.slate.com/id/2219599/

That article seemed more focused on the gloom 'n doom than making sense.

On the one hand, he's scared of the dollar's decline. Yet on the other hand, loathes the AIG bailout, which likely saved the dollar and Treasuries from economic Armageddon. Even if AIG never repays a penny of the bailout, letting them die last year would have cost us far more than the bailout will ever cost.

Cherry picking 2009 unemployment data to "prove" a trend is flagrantly disingenuous too. By that measure, you could show the same trend for any industry in any country.

Spitzer's article *does* make an important point though, and one that is often overlooked in the fatalistic way in which we wave our hand and say that our industrial base is gone, as if this was something that happened in the distant past. This is emphatically *not* true; while our domestic industries have been subject to increasing pressure for years, it wasn't until the early 2000s that many of them, including in the the textiles and electronics industries, gave up the ghost altogether (Westpoint-Peppermill in 2002, Ericsson's manufacturing arm in 2005, for example). American manufacturing's corpse is scarcely cold and we should be mindful of the fact that our propping up of the American economy via the various financial bubbles did little to mask our rot from within (hence the 'jobless recovery' of the early 2000s) and won't be a fix for it, either - what's there to support, now? It will only do us some good if we invest some of that 'freed' capital into something of substance besides more financial pancake-flipping.

As far as unemployment figures goes, the way in which these have been calculated have been manipulated several times during this last administration (and once during the Clinton years as well) in order to make the numbers look better than they are; the 'official' unemployment figures, as I think I recently mentioned, now no longer include the underemployed, those whose have been out of work for over a year and whose benefits have expired, or haven't looked for a job in four or more weeks. We now have several towns in California and Indiana that have an unemployment rate of *twenty* percent, even discounting the folks no longer counted, and just using the existing rubric, unemployment in Portland, OR (not a major manufacturing *or* financial services town) rose from 4.8% to 11.4% between April '08 and April '09, so yes, very very serious rises in unemployment are happening in this country even if those rises aren't evenly distributed.

From reading the article, my overall impression (which I happen to agree with) is that Spitzer's main point is not that the bailout was pointless but that the bailout itself accomplishes nothing long-term with regard to stabilizing the economy - it's a board thrown across a vat of quicksand to buy us a bit of time, but that's all. It's criminally, fun-house tragicomically ludricrous, for us to continue as a nation to put our money on the banking and financial 'industries' which benefit a few people massively and the mass of the population very little or not at all, when we're sitting on the greatest non-substitutable wealth in the world and not only treating its potential with disdain, but selling it out from under our feet for a fractional of its potential worth, and much of our power to determine our own economic fate with it.

Regards,
Nydia

P.S. I could add a long-winded addendum about how the decades-long decline in manufacturing jobs has *socially* destabilized the US as well, but that's for another post :).

The bailout of AIG should never have happened. In most cases the insured ended up being paid twice. Once from money AIG took and again from money they were given under tarp. It was, will be and still is the biggest chunk of thievery of the American taxpayer. The only reason any of these shithole excuses for business are showing anything positive on their balance sheets is due to recent changing of accounting rules. That is a fact.

Good article as to why we probably won't end up in the black unless things really change...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07cohanWEB.html

Oh hah, I just posted that in IM to a friend not 5 minutes ago, and while I'm skeptical (one of the authors did time for stock market manipulation, and they advocate 'letting the market fix itself' in many areas), their message about us shoring up a house of cards is right on...

I also thought he hit the nail on the head with regard to what has been disturbing about Obama's leadership on the matter. While he did put forward a fuel efficiency mandate, and the credit card reform bill was sorely needed, we haven't heard a peep about, you know, saving, or policies that might encourage such, even though American private spending over the last decade was clearly unsustainable.

Regards,
Nydia

As far as unemployment figures goes, the way in which these have been calculated have been manipulated several times during this last administration (and once during the Clinton years as well) in order to make the numbers look better than they are; the 'official' unemployment figures, as I think I recently mentioned, now no longer include the underemployed, those whose have been out of work for over a year and whose benefits have expired, or haven't looked for a job in four or more weeks. We now have several towns in California and Indiana that have an unemployment rate of *twenty* percent, even discounting the folks no longer counted, and just using the existing rubric, unemployment in Portland, OR (not a major manufacturing *or* financial services town) rose from 4.8% to 11.4% between April '08 and April '09, so yes, very very serious rises in unemployment are happening in this country even if those rises aren't evenly distributed.

My point was that you could throw a similar pity party for almost any industry, by cherry picking unemployment numbers from a bad year like he did. By his sort of opportunistic logic, we should be deeply concerned about the unemployment trend amongst lawyers and investment bankers! :rolleyes:

If the point is showing that the recession, in 2009, is hitting certain areas worse than others, how are unemployment numbers from 2009 out of scope? It's not like the 1999-2007 period saw a massive upswing in industrial job creation that spontaneously evaporated in 2009.

Recession-proof geography is nice if and only if you actually play to its strengths. We are no longer a principal food exporter or industrial nation, leaving much of our luck in fantastic farmland and river systems underutilized.
We're not talking about how that applies to investment bankers or other replaceable "knowledge works", who are all going to get outsourced to Pakistickiraq anyway.

I find it disingenuous when mister populist uses those opportunistic numbers to prove his point, when the very same numbers would torpedo his anti-finance positions. I'm sure he'd be objecting to them on similar grounds if someone were pointing out what dire straights many white collar industries are in today.

Oh hah, I just posted that in IM to a friend not 5 minutes ago, and while I'm skeptical (one of the authors did time for stock market manipulation, and they advocate 'letting the market fix itself' in many areas), their message about us shoring up a house of cards is right on...

I also thought he hit the nail on the head with regard to what has been disturbing about Obama's leadership on the matter. While he did put forward a fuel efficiency mandate, and the credit card reform bill was sorely needed, we haven't heard a peep about, you know, saving, or policies that might encourage such, even though American private spending over the last decade was clearly unsustainable.

Regards,
Nydia


I saw that...but then again comparing it to network security...who better to design your security than a hacker.

I do really like Obama, but I am in complete disagreement with him on the WallSt/Banking policies. He has only reinforced in my mind who owns this country...and it's not the people.

I give an Obama a C for his economic policies. Rich people spread the wealth around; taxing them more keeps the money directed to welfare services instead of small and medium-sized businesses where the money is sorely needed. Say what you will about rich people, but they do spread around quite a bit of wealth with their spending. Taxing only ensures that money goes to the government--and we know that's pretty much a black hole.

I find Obama's other policies alright, but his economic policies are wrong and short-sighted. I hope he sees the light soon.

I give an Obama a C for his economic policies. Rich people spread the wealth around; taxing them more keeps the money directed to welfare services instead of small and medium-sized businesses where the money is sorely needed. Say what you will about rich people, but they do spread around quite a bit of wealth with their spending. Taxing only ensures that money goes to the government--and we know that's pretty much a black hole.

I find Obama's other policies alright, but his economic policies are wrong and short-sighted. I hope he sees the light soon.


The middle class spreads the wealth around...the rich horde it...that is a fact.

Thirty years of trying the 'trickle down' economics model has shown without a doubt that it *doesn't* work; the rich invest the windfall in anything *but* job creating material spending, while the middle and lower classes have driven themselves into debt just to keep treading water and now spend an inordinate amount of their incomes paying *interest* on that debt, which feeds no job growth at all - and let's not forget that health care costs have risen 40% in the last decade (profiting no-one but the insurance industry and Big Pharma) and that a staggering 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the US are now due to health care costs.

But while we're talking about taxes, just take a moment and imagine, even with the ballooning of military spending during these last decades, what we could have invested in our own infrastructure if taxes had stayed at 1980 levels! Investment in information technology? Green energy perhaps? High speed rail? Universal Health care? How about simply not having had to loot Social Security, which *would* have continued to generate surpluses nearly indefinitely even *with* the decline in birthrate if we'd left it the hell alone to earn interest, in order to cover revenue lost to tax cuts (and looted to pay for defense spending)? Far from being a black hole, just to take one 'entitlement' program (Medicare), government pays for health care far more efficiently than private insurers do; and our USDA and EPA and FDA keep our food, environment, and medications and medical devices safe (or used to before they got packed with industry shills) far more efficiently than private industry hasn't, and our Corps of Engineers *used* to keep our bridges, dams, etc, safe until we starved them out of being able to do meaningful upkeep. Public schools, even after 30 years of systematic demonizing, defunding, and enforced added layers of administration that contribute nothing to quality of education, do a reasonable job of educating our children and for half or less the cost of private schools (and so far every one of those for profit 'Edison project' like pilot programs have produced *zero* significant gains at an enormous cost to the districts that have contracted for them). As it stands, we have, by repeated flattening of the tax curve, created both enormous deficits, a debt that we're now paying huge amounts of interest on that provides NO SERVICES AT ALL, and a de facto *regressive* tax system wherein there is an orderly transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich as the federal and state governments are forced to hike consumption/sales and other taxes in order to make up for what they are no longer getting from in income taxes (and the Bush administration was particularly effective at the 'double whammy' to the states of unfunded mandates and tax cuts, before we place *all* the blame on California for their economic crisis).

The American economy has been cannibalizing itself at a steadily increasing pace since the 1980s, and only investment in basic infrastructure-building industries, and *fair* trade laws, are going to put a dent in that. Yes, we, the taxpayers, are going to have to pay for it, and it'll be a damn sight harder now that we've experienced 30 years of job quality degradation and loss, wage stagnation (and now a shrinking tax base) and have had so much of our infrastructure and skilled workforce dismantled and sold off to the lowest bidder, but guess what? There's damned near nothing left to loot, the snake has eaten its tail all the way up to the ribcage, and granted the only reason that the economy is seeing some semi-earnest attention now is because the house of cards finally collapsing and *no* quantity of smoke and mirrors could disguise it anymore, but if we're fool enough to think (or allow ourselves to be convinced) that more of the same is going to get us out of this mess then frankly, we deserve the ignominous, Latin American future that awaits us.

Regards,
Nydia

P.S. Here's a short bit on the difference between the U-3 ('official' unemployment stat) and the U-6 (which includes underemployed workers, as well as those that have more or less given up) containing a link to current Bureau of Labor Statistics figures and their explanation (and the comments are worth reading as well):

http://moneyfeatures.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/06/08/unemployment-numbers-may-be-worse-than-you-think/

Oh, and some interesting reading on Alan Greenspan's history with the systematic defunding of Social Security here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/9/740304/-How-Social-Security-Was-Starved-To-Fund-Two-Orgies-of-Tax-Cuts:-An-Alan-Greenspan-Trickle-Down-Produ

Nydia,

Is it the responsibility of those who save money to carry the weight of those irresponsible with their money? Asians, such as the Japanese, Hong Kongners, Chinese, Singaporeans are responsible with their money. Are you suggesting that we should continue to reward this terrible habit of Americans?

Taxation does accomplish some results, except the bureaucrats who run our Government are not smart enough to know a spanner should not be more than $250,000. They do produce some work because after spending quite a bit, they realise some work needs to be completed.

Asian countries have low taxation, such as Hong Kong. Yet the public works projects are tendered by letters patent, and Hong Kong has some of the best infrastructure except their taxation is capped at 15%, 10% for health worker and teachers. Hong Kongers are responsible with their money. Should we reward the middle class for every extra thing they buy? You know how people become rich? Because they save and do not spend on things they don't need.

With apologies to Sanchek on derailing his thread ;)

Is it the responsibility of those who save money to carry the weight of those irresponsible with their money?

This bit of shilling has been shown to have been factually untrue ever since it was trotted out decades ago. You can throw racist strawmen out all you want, but people in every country have always tried to save money if they found it long-term worthwhile. That hasn't been true here for decades unless you made ridiculous amounts of it -- when the cost of living rises to the point you can't save anything, people do stupid things like believing the supposed financial experts who tell them that they can somehow leverage themselves out of debt with more debt.

It works just as well as it does for financial institutions, that is, great on paper and not at all once you run out of shells to hide it under. The rich are historically no more responsible with their money than the poor, they're better at declaring bankruptcy and getting away it.

I have little sympathy for the truly irresponsible, but it's hard to hold people of below arbitrary wealth lines responsible for a lying government outright robbing them. The US was once run on trade tariffs and friends, too, but it wasn't popular demand that changed that.

a staggering 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the US are now due to health care costs.

I read Warren's bit on that. I also read this:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/elizabeth_warren_and_the_terri.php

and this:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/why_warrens_new_bankruptcy_stu.php

I read Warren's bit on that. I also read this:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/elizabeth_warren_and_the_terri.php

and this:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/why_warrens_new_bankruptcy_stu.php

Clearly Mcardle, who's blogging combines cooking recipes and financial information pulled from annual reports, is far more qualified to write about this than Elizabeth Warren with her bankruptcy law experience.

Nydia,

Is it the responsibility of those who save money to carry the weight of those irresponsible with their money? Asians, such as the Japanese, Hong Kongners, Chinese, Singaporeans are responsible with their money. Are you suggesting that we should continue to reward this terrible habit of Americans?

Taxation does accomplish some results, except the bureaucrats who run our Government are not smart enough to know a spanner should not be more than $250,000. They do produce some work because after spending quite a bit, they realise some work needs to be completed.

Asian countries have low taxation, such as Hong Kong. Yet the public works projects are tendered by letters patent, and Hong Kong has some of the best infrastructure except their taxation is capped at 15%, 10% for health worker and teachers. Hong Kongers are responsible with their money. Should we reward the middle class for every extra thing they buy? You know how people become rich? Because they save and do not spend on things they don't need.

With apologies to Sanchek on derailing his thread ;)


You mean Americans like you? Or Americans like us?

So they don't add anything to the economy because they don't spend or they do spend and drive economic growth like you previously posted?

Are you suggesting we should spend money on things we don't need? If I'm $10,000 in debt, the last thing I need is a new TV. If I do have $10,000 in the bank, then buying a new TV would be OK.

Are you suggesting we should spend money on things we don't need? If I'm $10,000 in debt, the last thing I need is a new TV. If I do have $10,000 in the bank, then buying a new TV would be OK.

No, I asked a question based on your posts being inconsistent.

What he's saying isn't inconsistent at all.

What he's saying isn't inconsistent at all.

Probably right...I reread them. I agree with Rybit on the "$10,000.00" issue. I've said it here before, I don't use credit cards, I go by a very simple rule...If I don't have the cash I can't afford it"