Stagnation or inequality: Has the American economy exhausted...

[Marcus Bryant]

http://www.economist.com/node/18276872

[Marcus Bryant]

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS


America is in disarray and our economy is failing us. We have been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and talk of a double-dip recession persists. Americans are not pulling the world economy out of its sluggish state -- if anything we are looking to Asia to drive a recovery.Median wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s, and this multi-decade stagnation is not yet over. By contrast, the living standards of earlier generations would double every few decades. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government spending even when the middle class feels squeezed, the public sector doesn’t always perform well, and we have no good plan for paying for forthcoming entitlement spending. To the extent Republicans have a consistent platform, it consists of unrealistic claims about how tax cuts will raise revenue and stimulate economic growth. The Republicans, when they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the Democrats. How did we get into this mess?Imagine a tropical island where the citrus and bananas hang from the trees. Low-hanging literal fruit -- you don’t even have to cook the stuff.In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century: free land; immigrant labor; and powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.The problem won’t be solved overnight, but there are reasons to be optimistic. We simply have to recognize the underlying causes of our past prosperity—low hanging fruit—and how we will come upon more of it.

[boutons_deux]

There is NO leadership, certainly not in UCA, to face this very plausible stagnation of Western civilization.

Europe and Japan are in better shape to face stagnation because, while wealthy/corps do have influence, governments more often than act in their country's best interests rather than in the wealthy's interests.

eg, 4 kids died after vaccines in Japan, so Japan pulled the vaccines recently.

Japan halts vaccines from Pfizer, Sanofi after deaths of four children

http://www.naturalnews.com/z031616_vaccines_Japan.html

In USA, dead and maimed kids are just "collateral damage" from being strafed by BigPharma's profit runs. FDA is captured and emascualated.

SCOTUS shields BigPharma from lawsuits because the lawsuits would cost BigPharma too much. snif snif

The End of Oil will shake up the planet, sooner or later, but the UCA govt, under the thumbs of BigOil, is doing nothing.

Oil, the basis of industrial economies, disappearing while getting more expensive, ground and surface water, oceans, air, fish stocks, all under constant attack, and no leader has the balls to stand up to VRWC power.

[CosmicCowboy]

The simple fact is for most of us our life styles and our expectations of life styles have exceeded our worth to society.