“U.S. Living Standards Doomed to Fall”
Where’s Captain Obvious? Gross is simply stating what we have been seeing around us for a few years now. We didn’t need higher gas prices to tell us that name-brand foods are a thing of the past; people have been buying budget-brand groceries for years now at Wal-Mart (who have been kind enough to put in a frozen section by me). Wal-Mart will displace grocery stores as Americans flock to the “company store” to spend their inflated dollars on everything from food to cheap Chinese clothing to cheap Chinese tools to cheap Chinese toys. Our standard of living has been falling for over a decade, but it was masked by purchasing necessities with credit cards. The only difference now is the “company store” isn’t giving advances against future earnings that are looking more uncertain by the week...
If our money falls in value compared to the rest of the world, there will be *NO* cheap Chinese stuff, only expensive Chinese stuff.
Kinda like the Asian flu of 2000. The Korean won went from 800 won to the dollar to 3000 won to the dollar. Only it’ll be the dollar as the ‘won’ against the Chinese yuan (ie: dollar).
Fortunately, America is a large country that can grow it’s own food, has automakers, and can produce much of all we need, as long as the government and it’s regulators don’t get in our way. Combine that with a worthless dollar and the only thing we’ll be able to afford is American products, imports being too expensive. So that ought to get more American’s back to work.
That, and our currency will make our goods cheaper for the rest of the world to buy. (in other words, we’d be the next China for investment)
But like I said, that requires our government to get out of business’s way.