Posted on 04/29/2015 11:09:25 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In this century, economic growth has averaged 1.9 percent per year—down from the 3.4 percent the prior two decades—and anemic growth is a major force squeezing wages, the middle class and working poor.
Conservatives and liberals blame too much or too little government. Either way, getting policy right is critical to restoring opportunity for everyone.
Here are four issues that will be tough to solve but warrant serious attention.
1. The Baby Drought
The birth rate predictably fell during the recent recession but has not recovered. At 948 children per 1000 women, fertility is below what is necessary to maintain even a steady population.
Family formation is a major driver for the housing sector and supporting industries, and the baby drought is an important reason we hear so much about too little demand to sustain growth. Longer term, the U.S. risks the stagnation besetting Japan and northern Europe.
Since the 1970s, public policy has focused on educating young people about avoiding teen pregnancies and opening wider career paths for women, but the time has now come to start talking about childbearing at an appropriate age, responsible parenting and the adverse social consequences of postponing family formation too long.
2. Dumbing Down Education
National policy emphasizes pushing as many young people as possible into college. Young adults emerge heavily in debt—further slowing the birth rate—but as importantly, colleges are not doing a terribly good job.
Besieged by large numbers of emotionally and academically unsuitable students, universities are spending huge sums on mental health, social and remedial services and failing to provide the basic core of a college education—about 40 percent of graduates lack critical reasoning and complex problem solving skills.
Universities need fewer students and less money. Meanwhile community colleges, whose vocational programs are starved for cash, should be beefed up to provide skilled technical workers industry leaders say are in short supply.
3. Vanishing Startups and Small Businesses
Prior to 2000, small businesses created more jobs than large corporations but no more. Burdened by student loans, the number of young entrepreneurs has fallen off and new business startups— incubators for the next generation of Apples and Googles—are down overall.
Tougher government regulations—ranging from health care benefits to hiring practices—impose overhead that is more easily spread across large enterprises. To better bear compliance costs, smaller banks are merging into larger ones but small banks tend to specialize in funding small businesses and startups—be it candy making or cyber security.
Streamlining regulations for small businesses—especially community and regional banks—and student debt relief for young people starting businesses—similar to loan write-downs offered for those entering public service—would help.
4. Evaporating Edge in Basic Research
Government and corporate spending for basic research has been falling for decades.
Breakthroughs such as the laser, invented at Bell Labs and the personal computer, much of which was pioneered at Xerox, require investments whose benefits often are not appropriable to financing entities. Yet, those investments are essential to launching new industries—like fiber optics—and enterprises—like Microsoft.
The federal government must fund more basic research and incentivize private companies to do the same if the United States is to continue reaping economic benefits from cutting edge innovation. That requires tough choices about shifting resources away from other purposes to ensure adequate growth and tax revenues 10, 20 and 30 years from now.
Overall Americans have been myopic—focusing too much on the immediate benefits of personal and public decisions—by excessively limiting family size, emphasizing quantity over quality in higher education, choosing job security over the risks of starting a business, or devoting too much more money to social programs than science.
A prosperous economy and secure future for our children simply requires more unselfish behavior and risk taking.
Capital gains tax, stupid regs, IRS, OSHA, EPA, misc regulators from hell...
The first law of economics and the fundamental dynamic of prosperity, success and growth is give and it shall be given unto you. Contribute. Produce value. Simple and obvious. Create value and grow. Grow as you create value. Create. Produce. Give to the world. Your time talents, energy, capital. Create, work, produce, invest. Give.
Unfortunately many millions of people have been enabled and encouraged to survive by pursuing a course counter to the prosperity dynamic. As true as growth and prosperity through creating value is, so is the opposite. Continually demand that you be given more and you will never have enough. Never.
Most of what the government now does enables people to survive by taking and consuming rather than producing, giving and growing. It is a very clear choice between growing or stagnating. Thriving or struggling to survive. This trend has been progressively accelerating over the past several decades with predictable results. Struggle and hardship that is becoming more widespread, despair, anger and envy.
But there is an upside. Politicians have been able to acquire and maintain power by selling voters this bill of good. This is total insanity. How can people so deceived as to believe that they can grow and prosper by taking and consuming rather than producing and offering.?
The only hope is not more of the same but a radical reversal of course. 180 degree turn. So very simple. Contribute and it shall be given unto you.
Numero 3 is the most important. Too many regulations and the small banks which finance small business are going extinct.
Couple that with the 29 hour work week, 92 million unemployed, and the highest corporate tax rate in the world and guess what? It sucks to be us.
liberalism/statism stifling individual freedom.
That’s the primary cause.
Translation: We got too fat, dumb and happy.
Taxes from hell, a break down of goldy morality and traditions. In a nutshell.
In this century, economic growth has averaged 1.9 percent per year—down from the 3.4 percent the prior two decades
I would LOVE to see one of these financial morons demonstrate this, my only requirement is that you SUBTRACT GOVERNMENT DEFICIT SPENDING before doing your calculations.
1. A too-complex income tax system that doesn't reward savings and capital investment (unless you're willing to hire someone to find every loophole in the tax law)?
2. Too many complicated business regulations that have hampered the growth of business here?
Fix these two and watch the US economy zoom through the roof (and "float the boat" of other economies around the world) along with it.
...Because, there are too many within our country who HATE our country. And, many of these haters are in charge, elected or not...and those who don’t hate the country, are aiding and abetting the enemy by not doing anything about it. E.g., Boehner, Gowdy (yes, Gowdy, the fraud), McConnell, the list goes on.
3. A government that tells you, “You didn’t build that.”
Singapore is business friendly, low taxes, no food stamps, no unemployment compensation, no free stuff. Guess what it is prosperous, every 6th citizen is a millionaire, and has 40% more jobs than citizens. Those excess jobs are filled by foreign workers on 2 year work-visa’s.
Record numbers of people on government assistance in one form or another. That money comes from some place and that’s the government hoovering it out of the private sector.
Building small homes and small shops for new manufacturing starts and building skills has been effectively outlawed by the pensioned NIMBYs, their associates in state and local government offices, fees, etc.
I blame it on the corporate oligarchy/free traitor lobby.
Ship millions of jobs overseas all in the quest to make a quick buck, and set up the US job market to fail, through manipulation solely to make it fail, as an excuse to move our economy off shore.
People don’t realize just how little we actually produce here in the US compared to what we used to just a short time ago.
Our exports look like a third world shpping manifest. Grain, lumber, oil, and scrap metal.
Major firms like Apple and Microsoft are just sales and marketing firms in the US. They build nothing in the US.
If china were to cut off trade to the US tomorrow, the US would be totally screwed.
Don’t beleive me. Go into a hardware store or an industrial parts supplier,
and try to buy a part that wasn’t made in red china, and see how that work’s lut cor you.
All the reasons given are actually symptoms of a criminal communist govt conspiring to turn the country into a maleable sewer of humanity. The worst of the worst are welcomed here with open arms and a pre-filled out voter registration form. A country with the demographics of a ticket counter at JFK airport isn’t the good thing we’ve all been told it is.
On “education,” those who want to make something useful will learn from books, low-cost trade schools and their own experiences. An overly expensive degree in practiced pathologies of the sick establishment is not the way (feminism, homosexualism, pretended animal worship for shutting down potential competition, feigning of exaggerated sensitivities,...).
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. -- Declaration of IndependenceThe more things change, the more they stay the same. :-(
The government is the enemy.
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