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"You can't manufacture and assemble in the USA without it being automated" There HAS to be some automation in manfacturing. I don't want to buy purely hand made goods! Do you?

Its nearly 100% automated, you can't feed an American family on the wage that barely feeds a 7 year old chienese girl. The minimum wage in the USA is an order of magnitude more than what you can do overseas.

Someone is paying incoming tax on that effort. Your assessment of how automated it is is from silence.

no one pays tax on robotic assembly that displaces workers. The company actually pays the government less when it has fewer workers. Further, large companies pay virtually no tax like Apple and google. Have no idea what you even mean.

"The manufacturing jobs aren't coming back." Although you appeal to raw cynicism the jobs have been coming back since Jan 17'. Your attempt to re-write the news here will fail.

We are down 7 MILLION manufacturing jobs since the 70s and 6.5 million since the late 90s. Yes we have had a tiny uptick but just look at the trend - by 2050 we will probably be down 15 million.

I live in greece at the moment, but I'm a dual citizen. Both Greek and American.

What you call "Othomanic ways", in Greece is called "ragiadismos". It's a state of self-pity that I really never understood. And it's something easily played against your critical thinking if you choose to accept it. I really do not care for it, nor am I going to acknowledge such a false stereotype. So don't waste your time trying to talk me into it.

The way you can persuade me is with facts and numbers.

I like people who are direct - i respect it. I like to be direct also:

I am a nationalist (but not socialist) - i support Golden Dawn VERY actively. You may argue that i am too pro-Europe to be GD - i do it because i am an "ANTI-FASCIST"! I just mention it because i don't consider myself to be a "ragias"

https://www.creditwritedowns.c...

This is enough to lay waste to your theory about "Lazy" Greeks/ You can make the case of richer countries being more productive, sure that's normal. But lazy? No.

Few hours ago i made a reply to a fellow Greek - read what HE wrote!. But you want data: why don't you go to any field growing any product and ask any producer about the ethnicity of his workers... 1.5 million unemployed Greeks, about 1 million illegal immigrants working full time in Greece - i, even as a nationalist, am unable to blame the illegal immigrants working in the fields that they steal the work of Greeks, because NO Greek is interested to work there. O.K., i have a friend (until a couple of years ago was one of the most well known Greek SCADA engineers!) currently working in his father's fields... but he is a rare case - tsekare tora enan "anergo".

Krugman is a liberal. Primary surplus means nothing with the size of the debt on us. You can buy into the misinformation if you please. But to persuade me, you will need to show me numbers.

Oh... you want numbers... i respect numbers, and i respect people who respect numbers, but when i deal with Greeks the "numbers" become a way to avoid the truth. Sou to egrapsa apo tin arxi: tha kataliksoume na brizomaste me ta gnosta "ante gamisou re malaka" kai ta loipa... asto re patrioti, giati na xalasoumai tis kardies mas? Se ligo tha exoumai pali ekloges (elpizo!), as pame na apofasisoumai ti theloumai na ginei stin Ellada. Pare kai ena binteaki tora gia na min nomizeis pos thimosa: oi Germanoi ksanarxontai!

I live in greece at the moment, but I'm a dual citizen. Both Greek and American.

What you call "Othomanic ways", in Greece is called "ragiadismos". It's a state of self-pity that I really never understood. And it's something easily played against your critical thinking if you choose to accept it. I really do not care for it, nor am I going to acknowledge such a false stereotype. So don't waste your time trying to talk me into it.

The way you can persuade me is with facts and numbers.

https://www.creditwritedowns.c...

This is enough to lay waste to your theory about "Lazy" Greeks/ You can make the case of richer countries being more productive, sure that's normal. But lazy? No.

Krugman is a liberal. Primary surplus means nothing with the size of the debt on us. You can buy into the misinformation if you please. But to persuade me, you will need to show me numbers.

Money isn't a commodity like gold. When a bank issues a loan, they create an asset and liability at the same time. When you pay a loan back, the asset and liability are cancelled out. Most of our spending power is based on ledger records in a bank's double entry book-keeping system. But as an entire country, we haven't been paying back our loans at all. Each year we've borrowed more than we've repaid, even when you take inflation into account.

If you're running a business, your income is based on what your customers spend from their income plus new debt. Therefore the growth in your income is based on the growth of your customers income and the *acceleration* of their debt. If the acceleration of debt slows down and turns negative, even if the velocity of debt is still positive, your flow of income will reduce. If income is growing, you'll probably hire more people. If income falls you'll be forced to let people go.

So if we can extrapolate this to an entire economy, we should see a strong correlation between employment and the acceleration of debt. This, IMHO is the smoking gun.

For similar reasons I'd expect to see similar relationships between mortgage acceleration and house prices, or margin lending and share prices.

Private debt drives the economy. And yet economists have convinced themselves and us that we can safely ignore the role of banks debt and money. This situation is absolutely insane.

The United States does not have low taxation,

Yes, it does.

Ah yes, Austrian economics. Anyone heard of the Creditanstalt Bank of Austria? Hint... 1931 and the depression http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2009/03/1931.html

So, what is the national debt again?

Funny how distorted the discussion has become. The GP was talking about the size of the government, not the size of the national debt. You can have high deficit small government, and small deficit big government.

You have to understand that the government deficit is really just the mirror image of the private surplus plus the external surplus. Once you understand the sectoral balances (as explained in the linked article), you can chill out about the deficit and debt and start worrying about the things that really matter.

A poster above linked an article that talks about going after the bankers, etc. Interesting read.
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/09/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis.html

As an example of how ball-less, consider the S&L crisis where 1000 FBI agents investigated white collar crime. About 1000 bankers went to jail. The S&L crisis was 1/40th the size of the current meltdown.

Instead of investigations, there ate 120 FBI agents spread out across the country (even Enron required 100 investigators and WA Mutual is even bigger). Obviously, not even a single indictment let alone a conviction, despite the problem being 40x bigger.

If the Executive branch wanted to do something about it, it could very easily just by hiring more investigators.

William Black, lead prosecutor in the S&L crisis, has been trying to get this point understood, but googling him in google news leads to a real dearth of results. This is a good interview transcript:
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/09/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis.html

Yep, fraud enables the creation of bad debt. But this problem is bigger than that. The western worlds appetite for more debt has been insatiable. Any legitimate sounding scheme that could be invented to fuel that appetite would have worked.

The economy stopped being about true investment a long time ago, instead it turned into a massive ponzi scheme. Asset prices were inflated by easy credit, and those rising asset prices enabled more credit to be issued. One market after another reached a level of debt saturation, and time and again the financial industry simply moved on to the next sucker. A vicious spiral leading to an inevitable systemic failure when they ran out of greater fools.

And you can't really blame all the players in this game, since the rule book they are all following says that the total debt level in the system is irrelevant. They were all oblivious to the elephant in the room, right up to the point it stampeded, and even now only a few economist grudgingly admit its existence.

With our 20/20 hindsight view of what happened, and our forensic analysis of what went wrong, it's obvious to us now that these models were grossly flawed and doomed to fail as they did. But this isn't a great big evil conspiracy. Just blind ignorance and faith in a completely broken model of economics. This is the inevitable consequence of trusting your model of the world more than you trust your own eyes.

I highly recommend reading the work of Steve Keen, who's Debunking Economics book and Behavioural Finance lecture series, systematically destroy just about every model that economist hold dear. Who started publicly predicting our demise at least before 2006.

The only people who are saying "default for the first time in history" are Democrats who are fear mongering to scare little girls like you; and it has happened before. The reality is that the United States would not default; the government would use the money it brings in to service the debt and there would be a partial government shutdown.

The spectator goes on to point out that at the time the dollar was backed by gold. Presently the US dollar is backed by the US dollar, which makes a potential default impossible as the Fed can just print more money.... unless the rest of the world stops using the US dollar as its reserve currency. I'm not an economist or an accountant, but it seems to me that the resulting inflation would make it impossible for the government to service the debt. Again, this hinges on the rest of the world changing reserve currencies, but really what incentive to non-US nations have to stick with the US dollar?

Unfortunately, when the entire opposition party has made their one and only goal your destruction, you can't really do anything about it. They're willing to push the country into default for the first time in history, destroying the lives of millions.

The only people who are saying "default for the first time in history" are Democrats who are fear mongering to scare little girls like you; and it has happened before. The reality is that the United States would not default; the government would use the money it brings in to service the debt and there would be a partial government shutdown.

Systems of governance are ultimately a reflection of their society. In the case of "economic damage" we're talking about a society with masses of people unable to keep balanced personal budgets; generally at the forefront when it comes to rates of living on a debt, consumptionism, etc.

From where do you think those "fucktards in Government and greedy cunts on Wall Street" originate? Most people would cut a slice of the cake for themselves, given the chance (vs. merely claiming they wouldn't). Also, notice how universally the extended families of military members describe them as noble & honorary (nvm frightening rates still thinking that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11). Or how, even when generally bitching at "government waste", if in the family there's some engineer or blue collar worker doing some public project... then of course the work is essential, and the price fair.

Wow, I wish this post could be modded up to 14. Everyone needs to read it. US debt is astoundingly large, not just in government. Here is a graph. That is the root cause of the financial crisis, and until it is addressed we will continue having problems. That is, not only will we continue having problems, but they will keep getting worse until they are fixed.

what do you mean, it doesn't exist?

Now that's why paper money is great - you can put a trillion zeroes after any digit you like onto it, and it still means nothing.

It can be paid with a single banknote and you still have 25 Trillion left for coffee.

Now, you may object that the money is not from US exactly, but don't forget, Zimbabwe dollar used to be 1:1, and I think it's headed there again, so just wait a couple of years....

A pseudo-budget surplus. It was really just playing the numbers around, and including other monies (e.g. Social Security) in ways to make it look like a surplus. Yeah for fudging the numbers.

That is a dishonest and misleading statement. First it implies that the numbers came from the Clinton administration. They didn't they came from the CBO, which is NONPARTISAN. The CBO has never changed it's methods for reporting the deficit.

Add to that the fact that there were many jobs that were split in two, each with half the salary of the original

What?! I don't know what you're talking about, and I guessing you don't either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeforetaxfamilyincomemeanUS1989-2004.gif

Poverty was hardly at an all time low; and thanks to the dotCom boom it seemed to be at an all-time high.

You are right that poverty was not at an all time low, I'm not sure why I was thinking that(although there was a huge drop) but you are dead wrong about the all time high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_poverty_rate_timeline.gif

Then again, we went from manageable debt levels in the 1980's and early 1990's to the drowning levels of debt we have now - at all levels: federal, state, business, and personal - even before the recession started (so no, the recession is not to blame!).

Wow, what world are you living in?

http://images.creditwritedowns.com/2008/07/household-debt-vs-savings.png

Perhaps you danes shouldn't be so comfortable about your current benefit levels or job surpluses...

According this, the danish banking crisis is the worst in europe...

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2008/09/danish-banking-crisis-worst-in-europe.html