[ClearCase_guy]

Quick! Raise taxes on US businesses! Regulate something! Hire more bureaucrats! There’s no time to lose!

[goodnesswins]

DUH

[Cringing Negativism Network]

Quick!

Let’s send more good American jobs to communists.

[OrioleFan]

Obama lets no crisis go to waste. It’s gonna get ugly folks.

[kingu]

Everything will be just fine, as soon as January rolls around and the Bush tax cuts expire. Yep, that’ll fix those trade deficits right away...

Do they seriously think these tinkering numbers mean much? One out of ten people who still are bothering to look for work are unemployed, 1 in four in the 19 to 25 demographic are employed, most of them don’t even bother looking for work. Small businesses, the heart of our economy, are looking towards January, looking at rising minimum wage rates, required health benefits, and are deciding that they don’t need to hire anyone else right now.

And in California, 1 in five who have jobs work directly or indirectly for the government. I’m sure that trade deficits are enjoyable to watch, but how can you miss the glaring sinkholes in the underlying economy?

[YankeeReb]

Just a question from a non-economist: What happens to China’s economy when we run out of money to buy Chinese goods? All those newly rich Chinese aint going to be too happy going back to the rice paddles.

[sefarkas]

Professor Morici writes/proposes policies that are completely opposite of what Adam Smith observed over 200 years ago. A nation is better off buying what it is not efficient at creating and selling what it is efficient at.

Large trade deficits tax economic growth by reducing the demand for U.S. goods and services. They also lower productivity by causing workers to shift from export and import-competing industries to less productive sectors of the economy. Were the trade deficit cut in half, GDP would increase by nearly $300 billion, or about $2000 for every working American. Longer term, trade deficits reduce U.S. investments in R&D. As a consequence of the cumulative effects of trade deficits over the last ten years, the U.S. economy in 2006 will be about $1.7 trillion dollars smaller than it otherwise would have been. See more at this link.

There is neither the manufacturing capacity nor the workforce in-place in America that could replace what the Chinese provide so cheaply even in the intermediate term. You want a job sewing clothes? You want a job soldering circuit boards? Americans are able to stretch their stagnant income into the highest living standards on the Earth precisely because we do not waste our money on inefficient businesses that are protected and subsidized by a federal or state agency.

[unkus]

This is only one of the cards in the house of cards. A big gust of wind is a commin’.

[lmr]

Aside from the trade deficit, we have a housing market that quickly tanked after the clock ran out on Obama’s homebuyer credits. Also, instead of counting over 600,000 people that quit receiving unemployment benefits in June as ‘unemployed’, they’ve been shuffled into a category in which they don’t have be included in the unemployment rate at all. The ceased to exist, I guess. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. That they don’t count them as ‘unemployed’ any longer doesn’t mean those people quit looking for work and quit hurting. They have done things that have papered over the demise and also hid many problems with a trillion dollar Stimulus that produced nothing of long-term value except greater debt. It was a short term sugar high. There was no ‘recovery’ as many Democrats and the Left have claimed. No double dip. We’ve been in the chasm the whole time and it’s only going to get quite a bit deeper now. They only put off the day of reckoning and now it is nigh.

[cranked]

It’s more than our Trade deficits people...geezus.... =.=

[wjcsux]

Does anyone else remember the TV ads run by the unions in the early 60’s fighting automation in factories? They were trying to pull on the general public’s heart strings about people “losing their jobs to automation.” The truth is that if we started automation earlier, we would still have industry and employment.

[Post Toasties]

Oil and consumer goods from China account for nearly the entire trade deficit, and without a seismic change in energy and trade policies, the U.S. economy faces grave peril.

Thank the 'Rats for the former problem - they've been working to increase oil trade deficits for decades and now we are likely to get our very own Great Depression II as a result.