Think again. As long as the people who put these economically ruinous policies in place remain in power, they’re likely to.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How government spending impoverished us all. I think that the GDP is indeed a very flawed way of assessing the state of health of the economy. If we had a better measure, the notion that WW II ended the Great Depression wouldn’t make much sense at all. It simply set the stage for the recovery in the late forties, once we returned to sane economic policies after fifteen years.
I wonder if you are putting the blame where it belongs. The shrub administration and the republican congresses which ran up 7 trillion in debts.
I admit Obama is not doing the best job of straightening out the mess, but he has to deal with an obstructive Congress.
Can you admit who caused it?
I wonder if you are putting the blame where it belongs. The shrub administration and the republican congresses which ran up 7 trillion in debts.
Since you are “wondering”, why don’t you take a look at a graph of US debt versus GDP?
The obstructive Congress in which Obama barely got anything passed despite majorities in both houses, including at one point 60 Dem votes in the Senate?
The obstructive Congress in which Obama’s budget was defeated 97-0 in the still-Dem-controlled Senate?
The obstructive Congress consisting of Dem Senate leaders who killed Obama’s last jobs bill rather than go on record as voting for it?
That obstructive Congress?
Maybe he means the one that controlled both houses of congress from the 2006 elections to the 2010 elections.
Comments like this are usually followed up by something like this, “We could have spent that money on X instead.”
The problem is that the type of deficit spending we had under Bush (shrubya) and have now under Obama are bad no matter what the money is being spent on.
Obama will have added more to the debt in 4 years than Bush did in 8, so maybe it is time to get off the shrubby crack pipe.
But it is economic activity and hence, part of GDP. I don’t see the problem here with the GDP metric. It measures what it’s supposed to measure. Not all economic activity correlates with future economic activity.
Now there are problems with the assumption that greater GDP is automatically better, but that’s not going to be fixed by tweaking the GDP metric.
@stxflyer – Sure, FDR caused the spending. Post WWII there was only one place that industry had not been decimated by the war and that was here in the USA. We did well in the ’50s as we were the only game on the planet. LBJ’s Great Society took off in the ’60s with its out of control spending and gets us to now.
The GOP did not help stop this trend as much as it should have and even added to the debt and spending as well. Plenty of blame to spread around.
Obama has a regulatory stranglehold on business while funneling my tax dollars to his friends. Even if Congress could cut off the spending he can still choke business to death with his regulations while blaming the “obstructionist” Congress.
It will not get better until government gets its boot off business’s throat.
Politicians lie (unexpectedly?) Is it any surprise they do it with false metrics?
Too bad we don’t have some organizations to investigate and keep politicians honest. We could call this group… oh, I don’t know… the media?
Anything that includes a government thumb on the scale should be easy to clear up no matter how much smoke and blather. That we can’t is the best indication of how far we’ve fallen.
Metal consumption per capita isn’t really a very good measure (the subject of the second article).
A few examples.
Copper consumption declines once the major power lines and phone networks are in place. Our power requirements grow slowly, but our data requirements skyrocketed. Yet instead of adding more copper to increase bandwidth, we massively increased the amount of data a copper line can carry. Without our technological upgrades, to get 10 MB/sec we’d have had to take the 24 gage phone line that supported a 300 baud modem, expand it into a 2″ diameter solid copper rod, and then split that into tens of thousands of individually shielded strands. We’d also need to use a whole room to terminate it.
Steel use also levels off.
A 1972 model car was very heavy, used a lot of steel, and was extremely crude by today’s standards. As in aerospace, we don’t want to keep making heavier and heavier cars to perform the same task, we want to strip off the excess weight to gain performance.
The same holds true for many raw materials.
Put more simply, by his metric the SLS is infinitely better than a re-usable Falcon heavy because it throws away vastly more aluminum.
Perhaps not, but we still could find a composite index that would be useful. The advantage of metals is it’s not very game-able, it is what it is.
They’ve gamed the CPI for a couple of years now to keep it from going up.
‘Created or saved’ is now a classic.
How can anybody make decisions without reasonable input? Only with darts.
George,
Two words: Fiber Optics. Very little copper data cabling is laid down anymore. Copper thefts are only accelerating the changeover.
And I read on another website, possibly Nextbigfuture, that high-effiency Carbon-fiber based electrical cables are now possible. Fiber and this development could cut the need for copper by 90% easily.
Of course, WWII ended the Depression. When we got involved in WWII, the government stopped fighting “overproduction.” That started a boom that lasted until the mid ’70s.
And i forgot to mention PVC replacing copper plumbing pipe too.
Y = C + I + E – G