<The US stands with a huge global military preponderance.
Yup. Not by accident either. Or by robbing its citizens of a decent standard of living, as your heroes the Soviets did.>
Wrong.
According to the US Commerce Department, US consumers increased their spending by 0.8 percent in July, even as their personal incomes grew by 0.1 percent. That's the slowest pace in two years.
With US personal spending rising faster than incomes, the US personal savings rate fell from 1.3 percent to 0.6 percent. That's the lowest since December 2002. The Japanese have certainly noticed that General Motors and Ford have announced plans to reduce car and truck production in the fourth quarter by as much as 7 percent because of a growing inventory of unsold vehicles. Why produce so fast for the US internal market when Japanese car manufacturers could easily find themselves in a stale inventory selling war with the US car makers who are desperate to unload their unsold cars for fast cash?
The USA is the biggest "consumption nation" on earth. Having consumed all its own savings, what it consumes now is literally the incomes of numerous millions around the globe, in Asia, in Europe, and in Third World countries. For decades, all this US consumption has largely been powered forward by the overflow of the repeated US internal waves of credit expansion. Here, one only needs to look at the astronomical US trade deficits, now at a higher level than at any time in history. However, this US credit-expansion overflow is also the income of most Asian, and many other nations, on the level of international trade. These nations are now seeing US consumers increasing their spending at 0.8 percent while what they earn only goes up by 0.1 percent. The alarm bells are starting to ring in corporate offices all over the world, except in the Fantasy World of Conservative Fiction here on SI, where the Conservative Boys are too busy waving their American Flags to do some serious critical Thinking.
Economically, this "gap", now amounts to 0.7 percent every month which the American consumer has to borrow before he or she can spend. Annualized, that amounts to a huge 8.4 percent of borrowing just to consume! Is that what you call a decent standard of living for all Americans, Mr. Conservative? But take that 8.4 percent of US individual borrowings away from the global economic balance and, within a few months, the export industries of Asia and other nations will start to idle, and then stop.
I haven't even begun with all you lazy conservative boys who believe in Government social welfare handouts or what President Bush calls tax cuts!
PS You boys need to be enlightened. Have you considered some Liberal Therapy? |
