"As the unemployment rate crossed the double digit barrier for the first time since Michael Jackson learned to moonwalk, President Obama announced that he will convene a 'jobs summit' to finally bring the problem under control. Using all the analytic skill that his administration can muster, the President is determined to figure out why there are so many people losing their jobs and then formulate a solution. ... Obama is pursuing, with unprecedented vigor, the same policies that have for decades undermined our industrial base and yoked us to an unsustainable consumer/credit driven economy. ... An article in this week's New York Times by veteran writer Louis Uchitelle confirmed a fact that I have been alleging for years. Uchitelle pointed out that foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of US GDP and productivity. ... The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers", Peter Schiff (PS) at Financial Sense, 13 November 2009, link: http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schiff/2009/1113.html.
I agree with PS and have said this for about 11 years.
2 comments:
Our economy is hollowed out... I hope our spirit isn't too...
The President will soon find that all the institutional and media tricks developed and perfected by Bill Clinton and extended by GW Bush have tired the people.
A pretty "jobs summit" with earnest luminaries pledging their brains and resources will console for a while. But our problems are structural and have no sound bit solutions.
Take the first steps in righting America.
1. Ask Bernanke, Summers and Geithner to step aside.
2. Truly reform the finacial system.
2. Tell the people the true fiscal situation facing this country.
3.Haircut Treasury and muni holders.
4. Shrink the war machine.
5. Develop high speed rail and other infrastructure.
6. Reform campaign finance.
7. Create a template for resetting public and private pension obligations.
8. Reform Fannie and Freddie.
9. Address health care.
10. Revisit entitlements.
More likely we will drift along. The new normal 10+% unemployment... the empire collapses...
Not just GDP has been overstated. The Productivity gains that Chairman Greenspan and others so frequently touted, which were by the way never matched by wage/income gains, rather by income/wage losses, were also overstated for the very same reasons.
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