Posted on 11/24/2010 7:18:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It may be turkey week in America, but it's goose month in Germany. In many restaurants, you can get goose in your salad and goose in your soup to go with your goose entrée. Diners fairly honk their way through November.
But then, Germans have something to honk about. Germany's economy is the strongest in the world. Its trade balance - the value of its exports over its imports - is second only to China's, which is all the more remarkable since Germany is home to just 82 million people. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate - two percentage points below ours - is lower than at any time since right after reunification. Growth is robust, and real wages are rising.
It's quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.
Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports). Nor have German firms been slashing wages and off-shoring - the American way of keeping competitive - to maintain profits.
One key to Germany's miracle is the mittelstand, as the family-owned small and mid-size manufacturing firms that dominate the economy are known. Last week, I visited AWS Achslagerwerk, a factory of one such firm, in the farmlands of Saxony-Anhalt, about two hours west of Berlin. As in many such companies, this factory turns out specialized products: axle-box housings for Chinese and German high-speed trains, machine tools requiring climate-controlled precision measurement.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Think again. The 100,000 pages of government anti-business and pro-union regulations are not enough for the socialists, the democrats.
The EPA is about to TOTALLY ban all coal power plant construction, and and any new manufacturing construction:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2605230/posts
If Democrats take a drubbing in November, the Obama Administration is likely to turn to regulation to achieve its “transformational” agenda. Which is all the more reason to cheer on Texas as it pushes back against the EPA’s illegal attempt to rewrite the nation's clean air laws.
To wit, the Lone Star State is resisting the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate carbon under the clean air laws of the 1970s. These regulations will be damaging enough on their own. But the EPA and chief Lisa Jackson are also threatening to punish Texas and other green dissenters with a de facto moratorium on any major energy or construction projects. Just what the economy needs.
I am afraid you are correct. Somehow “doing” things and building things has become second rate. I see kids going to college who shouldn’t and getting degrees that don’t qualify them for much if anything. Poor things don’t even understand why their “skills” are so useless.
The last guy I can remember who was a true journeyman was a millwright working for the old Allis Chalmers turbine equipment company.
The latino sweeping chips and feeding parts into the 5 axis cnc machine hasn’t got a clue what he is actually doing.
The EPA has gone to excess in many areas, but we lost the electronics manufacturing industry and much of the textile and apparel industries in the '50s and '60s before the EPA came into existence during the Nixon administration. Why did we lose industries and manufacturing jobs before the EPA even existed.
This export of manufacturing jobs started long before there were any EPA regulations to speak of.
Think again. The 100,000 pages of government anti-business and pro-union regulations are not enough for the socialists, the democrats.
The EPA is about to TOTALLY ban all coal power plant construction, and and any new manufacturing construction:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2605230/posts
If Democrats take a drubbing in November, the Obama Administration is likely to turn to regulation to achieve its “transformational” agenda. Which is all the more reason to cheer on Texas as it pushes back against the EPA’s illegal attempt to rewrite the nation's clean air laws.
To wit, the Lone Star State is resisting the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate carbon under the clean air laws of the 1970s. These regulations will be damaging enough on their own. But the EPA and chief Lisa Jackson are also threatening to punish Texas and other green dissenters with a de facto moratorium on any major energy or construction projects. Just what the economy needs.
No, you are wrong. Democrats and progressives have been writing anti-business laws since at least 1890.
Repeal all laws to 1890. No more problems.
Did you read the Article that I posted? The EPA is socialism, tyranny, statism.Socialism never works. In a conservative forum, amazing.
People know how incompetent the TSA is because that is out in the open but people don't know what the EPA is doing. The EPA is about to in the new Year to basically shut down all new coal power plant construction and new manufacturing plants in the U.S.A. But you trust the EPA to keep your environment safe when government doesn't work? Amazing the trust that people have in the EPA(government) .
Specifically what did I say that I am wrong about? And the EPA was brought into existence in 1970 by Republican Nixon.
Repeal all laws to 1890. No more problems.
I think you've let your hyperbole get the best of you.
Sigh....
Not going to waste any of my time or effort arguing with a loud-mouthed idiot like you.
FYI Nixon is one man, and last time I heard presidents can't write laws.
I see many of you repeat the liberal mainstream media media brainwashing
The EPA is just about to ,using all those previous laws, about to completely destroy the U.S. economy.
So you think what the EPA is about to do is not a threat to manufacturing and the economy. 99% of people don't even know this shadow government is about to do this.
Your name calling doesn’t affect me.
Guess the truth hurts you, that you trust government.
No wonder the U.S. is in trouble. The liberal mainstream media has brainwashed a lot of puppets.
Yes you can on both counts. Government tax policies punish domestic manufacturing and incentivise offshoring. The demolition of domestic manufacturing was premeditated and is ongoing.
You need to learn a lot more about Nixon. He originated affirmative action, as well as the EPA.
Every half sensible person opposes cap and trade, but you are painting with such broad brush, and painting over 120 years of history, that it is pointless to try and respond any more to such sweeping generalities.
Importing provides the banksters more opportunity for skimming at ports of entry and foreign exchange manipulation. That is one big reason they favor importing over domestic manufacturing.
It’s much worse than cap and trade . The EPA is basically shutting down the economy. It’s in the article. And the EPA is doing it around Congress and over the people of the U.S. This is tyranny.
A democrat Congress created the EPA. A president cannot write legislation,nor make laws.
So you are saying , one man Nixon is to blame for all our troubles? Nixon is one man, who doesn’t represent all Republicans nor all Conservatives nor anything except himself and his human failures like we all have. Just one man that’s all the the liberal media used to further the liberal agenda by getting even greater majorities of Democrats/Marxists in Congress
You have little or no understanding of what a “Republican” was in 1970, or of what a “Democrat” was in 1970. Things were very different then. The main difference was the war in Vietnam. There was a lot of agreement on many other issues, and there were many very conservative Democrats and many liberal Republicans still in Congress.
Creation of the EPA.
On July 9, 1970, amid a growing public demand for cleaner water, air and land, President Nixon submitted to Congress a reorganization plan proposing the establishment of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an independent agency in the executive branch of the federal government. The plan proposed bringing together 15 components from five executive departments and independent agencies.
As I said, Democrat and Republican meant something very different in 1970. If you could find a vote on Nixon's EPA plan in Congress, you'd likely find many Dems against it and many liberal Republicans for it.
And, yes, Nixon also did a great deal to advance affirmative action.
Indeed, he did.
But one of the observable facts of the last forty years is that a great deal of well-meaning legislation has been co-opted and perverted by Democrat administrations and the bureaucracy.
EPA, Dept of Education, Affirmitive Action, ADA, Clean Air Act, you name it. They all started out as modest and unobtrusive, with admirable goals.
And, then, the liberals got ahold of them...and distorted them into blunt instruments to attack American freedoms.
Liberals are parasites dedicated to the destruction of the host.
Only Congress can create laws.
A democrat Congress wrote the laws that authorized and created the EPA.
Now defend the tens of thousands of other laws that your democrats/marxists created which are the problem: each e law created hundreds of agencies and hundreds of thousands of pages of anti-business regulations as in Obamacare.
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