Could it be the high cost of dealing with our ever growing body of regulations here vs somewhere else?
Could it be the high cost of our personal, business and corporate tax rates and a government that wants to raise them even more on those who produce?
Could it be the high cost of our labor along with the onerous unions and their frequent disruptive strikes?
Could it be we have priced ourselves out of the market and made it too costly to do business here? (Check out the exodus from California, Illinois, NY, etc.)
Could you add to that the uncertainty of our economy and a government that is spending way beyond budget now, with looming completely unpayable entitlements of the ever growing welfare state waiting ahead and as far as the eye can see that no country on earth could hope to pay for?
Could it be that we are no longer one of the freest countries in the world and are rapidly sinking down that list?
No, of course not. It's Bush's fault.
We could do better and we used to, but instead we will do worse.
On the plus side, it's easy to stand out when the competition sucks. Too bad there aren't many jobs to be competing for.
I agree our corporate tax rates are too high but Google “top 10 personal income tax rates” and you will not find the US on there. The rich are, of course, free to move to any country they wish as long as that country will accept them but where exactly are they going to go? Japan, Canada, and especially Europe have more regulation and higher taxes than the US, Russia and China have repressive governments that require bribes to get anything done and deny basic rights like freedom of speech we Americans are used to, and, while many developing countries would be happy to accept affluent American immigrants, they are developing countries for a reason: repressive and/or unstable governments, anti-American sentiment, and a lower standard of living are common in third world countries. In short, the US is the worst country in the world to be rich...except for all the others.
The executive class isn’t the only one that produces. Isn’t the worker whose labor actually produces the widget also a productive member of society? Management plays an important role in the economy, to be sure, but to believe the rich are the only productive members of society, as you seem to, ignores the contribution of the working class (emphasis on “working”, I’m not talking about welfare queens here, just the working poor).
What “frequent disruptive strikes”? I haven’t heard about any strikes in the last few years. Of course that could just be the MSM covering things up as usual. But I will say that compared to some countries I have been to (e.g. Italy and Argentina) the US unions are downright amateurs when it comes to strikes, particularly the private sector. The Italian workers, in spite of their high wages and generous benefits, go on 1-day strikes for the sheer heck of it and the student occupation of University of Buenos Aires in 2010 lasted months. We haven’t seen that kind of radicalism in the US since the 1960s, and for that I am very thankful.
I agree that the deficit is a huge problem that should not be ignored by liberal politicians. but I fail to see how more tax cuts for the rich is going to help the deficit or indeed do anything except create more jobs in currency-manipulating China.
I never said it was Bush’s fault because 1) Congress and the Federal Reserve have more power over our economy than any president. It was Congress that passed fiscally unsustainable budgets (when they could pass a budget at all) and the Federal Reserve who enabled the housing bubble with its unrealistically low interest rates. 2) This crisis has been decades in the making. What we have now is the end result of decades of political mismanagement by Democrats and Republicans alike, each obsessively rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So I don’t believe it’s all Bush’s fault (as the liberals would have us believe) or even all 0bama’s fault (as some conservatives believe).