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Excellent post with many strong points!

I don´t believe that politics has such an huge influence... ...The american economy showed and shows solid growth and is healthy

We agree that Stephen Roach was wrong when he said the opposite in the article that started this thread.

We also agree that measuring economic well-being is hard work. You should get paid a lot of money to "develop credit rating systems". Like you said: "the gains of my assets represents income" but "no company on that planet is allowed to publish unrealized gains and companies sometimes have these huge hidden reserves". Besides the problem with hidden reserves there is also the problem of inflated balance sheets where people say they have a house worth a million dollars, but they complain that they can't sell it for what it's worth (home sales dipped 2.8% last month to an annual rate of 6.56 million). The reality is that if nobody wants pay a million dollars for the house, then the house is not worth a million dollars.

The article confused the trade deficit with the budget deficit as if they were the same --they aren't . The article said they're both bad --they aren't. The trade deficit is a capital surplus. In 1960 the US had a trade surplus and a capital deficit so bad that there was high unemployment and gold reserves were lost. The budget deficit is how we manage our cash flow inside the country. Saying that "the deficit of today are the taxes for my children" is not true, it's only half true. The other half if the truth is that wealth of today is an inheritance for the children; so the best way to care for the future generations is to not think about the deficit or the wealth separately, but think about the total. Our total is good and it's getting better.

"You should get paid a lot of money to "develop credit rating systems"

That´s not really true i get paid 50% from a bank and 50% from public funding because my work is at a university but i think about changing because it is the right time to do so but i like my present work and i am very free in my job.

it is mainly statistic work and looking for new variables that better separate "good" from "bad" companies. these variables should help to predict bankruptcy or major problems of companies and should help to reduce the cost for banks with bad loans. Every bank uses these systems and they mainly are based on the same statistic methods using ratios from the balance sheet but now new methods or better new variables are necessary to create better results.

coming back
"The reality is that if nobody wants pay a million dollars for the house, then the house is not worth a million dollars."
That´s the problem when i was a kid i collected stamps and had a book where the prices of these stamps where published and i always thought i make a great deal when i bought stamps on a market because the prices were lower than it was published in my book. At some point i had to learn the difference between realized prices and not realized prices because as you said if nobody wants pay a million dollars for the house, then the house is not worth a million dollars." Now my stamps have no value anymore because nobody collects stamps because it is not modern anymore and this is true for every asset.

Clearly if a society has a huge GDP or a huge amount of wealth the tax base is bigger or could be bigger but the problem is in some ways the same as with individual households. With a growing deficit grows my debt burden because of higher payments to meet my obligations. So i have to increase my income ( taxes; perhaps additional growth) or i have to reduce my spending. otherwise my debt will increase all the time.
But these are very complicated issues my prof at university wrote a book about the justice between generations and how to measure this if someone can measure that at all. A small example future generations will benefit from the infrastructure and other investments and so it could be fair to say that they have to pay their part of these investments.