Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (261193)	4/10/2008 12:40:43 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

First, your missed the point all together. The general public would not care less how much airplane or nuclear plant manufacturing capacity US has, when they can't get decent shoes or cloth on their back or have a new hard drive. This was exactly my point. Satellites may bump up the industrial capacity number in dollar terms, but you cannot eat or wear them. Using dollars as a measure of industrial production is a terrible unit for this argument. Suppose you have two countries A and B, where A makes all the high end goods, say airplanes, and B all the low end goods, say food and oil. In case of a fall out, B will not be flying anywhere but A will starve. This despite the supposed higher industrial production of A, in dollar terms. Second, the government uses all kinds of bogus accounting terms to adjust the inflation and production capacity and so on. These are very questionable. One of the most obvious and debated ones is that price inflation (which affects the dollar value of industrial production you brought up) is constantly weighed down because the government feels (somewhat arbitrarily) that this year's car being 5% more expensive than last year simply represents 2% inflation. The other 3% is chucked up under improvement in quality and shows up in increased industrial production. Furthermore, over 50% of China's exports are due to American manufacturing in China. I have strong suspicions that through accounting games, companies claim much of that Chinese export as a US industrial production. So you are nowhere near making your point.