In this country, you might be able to get the GOP to go along with that kind of spending, since the roads are most needed in pork-lovin' red states. Besides, one could package a road-building program as a military necessity. Thus was born Ike's interstate highway program; history could repeat itself.
But:
Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.Edumacation? That's a much harder sell in America.
But:
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade.Okay. So that brings us to an appallingly simple question: What should we concentrate on exporting?
I mean aside from jobs.
10 comments:
"What should we concentrate on exporting?"
Neo-conservatives/bankers?
Nah, wouldn't work. They'd pay us NOT to export them and that would be nice, but we'd still be stuck with the Neo-conservatives/bankers.
I havnt commented much of late on your site. One reason is that there is little that I think appears misunderstood or misrepresented - forgive the implied arrogance. The other reason is that I have started a new job working for an even more extreme example of financial capitalist piracy. Lets call it a finance venture specialising in topiary.
However, for what little my comments are worth, I want to emphasise two things.
1) Things are still getting worse. The economy and the financial system. Its not stable. Its not accelerating either right now. But its still getting worse. Great depression analogies are not so far off anymore - give or take our more substantial resources today
2) The authorities don't understand whats wrong. And they seem to have bought the big banks mantra that they are two big too fail. This is not true. If Citi goes bust it doesn't matter provided its a controlled demolition. The bond owners and the stock holders should be the first to pay. Not the taxpayers.
And as for that 500k limit - dont make me laugh. More loopholes and exclusions than I can enumerate.
I remain amazed and disgusted. Our leaders are corrupt fools.
Harry
The Hunting & Gathering Economy was replaced by the Agricultural Economy, which was replaced by the Industrial Economy, which was replaced by the Information Economy. Why can't the next stage be the Education Economy? What is Education but a value-added form of information?
We can export education by creating educational media and the infrastructure (communications technology in internet, radio, TV, movie projectors) to share and evolve them.
Anon is near home plate; our biggest and best export is our pseudo culture in the form of movies and music and games. Now wouldnt that make em crazy if our collective butts were saved by hollywood and gamers?
How about exporting Tyler Durden-style soap? "Tyler sold his soap to department stores at $20 a bar. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them."
Speaking of TD, didn't he say; "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."
What else can be exported? Well, everyone in the world is going to need smart grid technologies, and the USofA is a leader in that. We could also invest 1/1000th of the bailout amount on proving a few technologies out there really work-- like Teslas wireless transmition, Liut. Col. Tom Beardon's MEG, Joe Newman's motors ...even the applications of John Bedini's open source energy techs and of Stan Meyer's open source techs. Start doing these, ramp them into production and start selling 21st century electricity techs before Siemens and others master it all...
Also, infrastructure is in dire shape. not roads as much as sewers (especially out east), water lines, waste handling... so it's not just frivolous, it's needed. Plus once reworking the water, we can turn our sewers and mains into micro power plants with stuff like Rentricity
And were Americans to now make a concerted effort to create negawatts instead of looking to build new nukes, we could get pretty much see everyone get back to work, because the more energy efficiencies that are mandated, the more people are needed. EE = jobs.
Oh and forget about exporting edumacatoin-- 1st off Neil "S&L" Bush has cornered that. His Ignite! edu-software is now exporting our great learnin' far & wide, and Poppy's in on the take. So unless you plan on going and teaching ESL in Korea, fagedaboudid,the soap will be an easier sell
There isn't anything that we can export that can't be made at a cheaper cost in another country. Even if we do manage to create "green" jobs, that doesn't mean that those jobs will stay in this country or that workers won't be imported to do them.
From Sherle Schwenninger (who holds Bill to blame also):
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/schwenninger:
"The uncomfortable truth is that the current system of global commerce and transnational finance is inherently prone to crisis... Any sustainable recovery on the domestic front, therefore, will depend on his success in getting other countries to agree to fundamental changes in that global system."
"(T)he globalization of the Clinton-Bush era not only lacked safeguards for labor but rested on two mutually reinforcing, flawed models of growth: debt-financed consumption in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon economies and oversaving and underconsumption in the production-oriented export economies of Asia."
"(A) recovery program will have to be global in scope, and it will have to correct the huge imbalances globalization created."
Schwenninger states that the far more healthy economies of "China, Japan, Germany and the petrodollar states.... must lead in spurring world growth not only because, with the United States, they bear responsibility for the crisis but also because they are in the best position to lead, given their large surpluses and foreign currency."
old dem
What should we export?
Hope.
I don't expect you to allow this off-topic comment to be seen by your readers, Joseph. In fact, I hope you catch it and delete it before it appears, since it would be a distraction from the important current commentary on Japan's lost decade.
But as a long-time reader of yours, whose parapolitics interests closely parallel your own past multi-decades of study, I would like to direct your attention to another blog, also managed by an intellectually honest seeker of hard answers.
Unfortunately, since you have devloped a such near-rabid aversion to the rantings of most of today's Kashoggi-funded "troofers/trannies," you will need to hold your nose, as you discover that his humble blog is hosted within a cacaphonous casbah of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists whose behaviour you so thoroughly despise.
The guy whose low-decibel, non- Alex Jones/We Are Change style of research I'm hoping you will give an open mind to reading is named Aiden Monaghan: http://911blogger.com/blog/2074.
Instead of trying to thrill impressionable readers with an endless stream of wild accusations based on axe-grinding speculations, Aiden has spent hundreds of hours doing the kind of old-fashioned, gumshoe/grunt paperwork that the most honourable of the vintage JFK/MLK/RFK researchers (whom I know you genuinely, nostalgically admire) used to provide us, back in the dear, dead, pre-Internet days:
Filing polite and meticulously worded FOIA requests to various federal agencies -- and then painstakingly sifting through whatever evasive responses and/or redacted documents they eventually, reluctantly disgorge.
Yes, Aiden has been doggedly trying to determine if the Feds'very own paper trails can either prove or disprove Uncle Sam's version of the 9/11 attacks.
After you've spent some quality time reading through the blog's many reproductions of Aiden's earnest FOIA requests and the Fed's often highly implausible and sometimes quite suspicious replies, please consider composing a CANNONFIRE commentary on Aiden's work, if it proves to be of value to you.
I'm not asking you to publicly eat a big slice of humble pie or munch on a bitter bite of crow -- just to consider acknowledging the modern work of an old-fashioned conspiracist, like the ones we used to value and learn from.
A Fellow Grassy-Knoll Geezer
Export the politicians.
Laughably, a lot of our prior exports were our 'financial products,' including the mortgage backed securities, which were sold world-wide and provided somewhere on the order of $500 billion in foreign trade earnings as recently as a couple years back.
Somehow, I don't think there will be much demand for our 'innovative' 'financial' 'instruments' (of mass destruction) any time in the near to medium term.
XI
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