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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (172142)	9/16/2011 5:45:46 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542153

Mary; See if I have this right; ....you think that stimulating the economy - even though much of that stimulus ends up in China - is good because only some of it goes there. Some stays here. The Apple example? I think that is bad because we are borrowing money and paying interest on that money from now until it is paid back. That removes an opportunity for us in the future. I don't want my taxes now and the interest on that borrowed money going to China. You support the Chinese worker with your taxes - but don't ask me to do so because I won't. <<<<<It is in the execution. You go into debt because you spend more than you take in. You waste trillions of dollars on wars that you don' t have to fight. >>>>>> But if Obama can't execute who in the world will be able to? I just do not agree with your conclusion. Wars are stimulative in every sense of the Keynesian theory. Right i you and I don't agree that wars are a good use of money - but you just can't argue that spending on big ticket items needed in war somehow doesn't stimulate while spending on Apple products largely coming out of China do. That just doesn't make any sense. Do you think that somehow a Boeing worker uses his income from working on a piece of military hardware somehow different than an Apple worker? There is no better way to stimulate than with wars - but it just is not working. If we end the wars, that stimulus goes away. Goes away and now we have to employee all those military workers. I'm waiting for Johns report on the book he is reading.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (172142)	9/16/2011 11:25:21 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542153

Learning from China: Why the existing economic model will fail by Lester Brown For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does. Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel. These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume conservatively that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then in 2035 income per person in China will reach the current U.S. level. If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2035 China’s 1.38 billion people will use four fifths as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world’s forests. If Chinese grain consumption per person in 2035 were to equal the current U.S. level, China would need 1.5 billion tons of grain, nearly 70 percent of the 2.2 billion tons the world’s farmers now harvest each year. If we assume that in 2035 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The entire world currently has just over one billion. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area equivalent to more than two thirds the land it currently has in rice. By 2035 China would need 85 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 86 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves. What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either. The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality? energybulletin.net