The Dow Jones industrial average swept past 12,000 for the first time Wednesday, extending its march into record territory as investors grow increasingly optimistic about corporate earnings and the economy.
And for those watching the mid-terms south of the border, this item on recent US media poll sampling.
Further thoughts…. anyone who buys into the (inexplicable) Canadian media theme that the US economy has struggled under Bush, while ours soars to new heights .. really needs to take a trip from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Fargo, North Dakota.
(Recommended – comments by Jeff Cosford on this thread.)
Mr. Pablubiski:
The boom in the 50s happened in spite of the high levels of unionization. Actually, I think that the peak of Unionism happened in the late 60’s in the US and CDA which less than 5 years later went into a nasty period of stagflation and drift due largely to the uppityness of the trade unions. The reverberations of their extortionist tactics of which we are now witnessing in the death throes of GM and Ford.
One of the larger causes of the 50s boom was the construction of the interstate hwy system. The new highways were major economic stimulants both because they reduced the cost of transport enormously and also because, by eliminating a massive logistical roadblock, they allowed the service sector to flourish even more than the manufacturing sector did.
Companies had to improve their productivity as their competitors were now just hours away instead of a day or more. Improving the soft costs – office costs, etc. – was the easiest and thus the demand for the myriad of service providers boomed.
It is notable that the size of the Service sector in the US surpassed that of manufacturing in the mid-50s.
And as you are no doubt aware, the service sector is notoriously resistant to the siren-song of unions (nb – I do not consider gov’t employees to be a service).
Bob:
It’s the considered opinion of many of the occupants of the same gene pool as you (ugh)that stock indexes are perhaps the best barometer of where an economy is headed in the short to medium term – from 3 months to 3 years. The indices foreshadow recession and slowdown as well as growth.
Right now the indicators for the US market are quite good in a nominal sense as the drop in US currency has improved competitiveness. Adjusted for the drop in US$ value, the US markets have only recently begun to outperform the TSE.
If the 2.2 trillion of new borrowing was a bad idea the markets would have reacted negatively as they did during Rae days when the insanity of increased state control was part and parcel of the need for new borrowing.
2.
The flow of illegal immigration no doubt has been a boon to the US, but to say they are all being paid $2 per hour is false.
A more important key to US’s (and the rest of the first world’s) growth has been the cheap labour cost of far east – primarily china -produced goods that have allowed the US et al to download those parts of production in order to free up labour to do more productive per unit of labour products – i.e. software, entertainment, telecomm, aerospace, etc.
If you are opposed to both the mexican and china effects I assume that you do not eat lettuce or strawberries from California or shop at Walmart and that you would be prepared to set back the world’s economy by about 15 years worth of growth, fully aware that the people who would suffer most from such draconian actions would be the chinese and mexicans (and koreans and on and on) – in whose defense you probably say you are acting.
Well, Cherenkov, one of the first things I learned in in economics studies was that economists will always disagree, at least in a hair-splitting manner.
But I think we can agree that tax cuts are a good, not a bad, idea, when taxes are too high.
Besides, the stimulatory effect isn’t instantaneous… it takes some time to kick in… and it has, as we know now.
Re 50’s unionization.
I think “Rosie the rivitor” had something to with the 50’s boom too. Because she stayed on the job after the war and thus began the era of double incomes with it’s obvious lift to national productivity. Then came “the pill” in the 60’s, which combined with Gloria Stalin and her degrading of motherhood and pretty soon we had “dinks” double incomes, no kids. Then the boomers could really take off with their entitlements.
Socialism doesn’t work unless more real workers are coming into the system than people getting government cheques, Quebec in particular is faced with a demographic inversion that is financially frightening … ditto Old Europe.
Yeah, the US economy is about to go bust, just look at the Dow. Also, do the math, with a .30 cent a gallon sir tax on the sale of gas and diesel the entire US debt is history in less than 2 years. Get the numbers from the US Dept of energy. Same old lefty scare BS, can’t it right themselves so alter the facts so what’s right sounds wrong. No wonder Government is so inept at most everything they try and do, most of these idiots work there.
Bob, Bush borrowed “$2.2 trillion dollars”? A little more detail on that statement, sweetie, is in order.
Yes, this is a direct question to you.
I’m waiting…..
My previous posting wasn’t meant as an argument in support of unions. I merely wondered why an era characterised by high rates of unionisation was so prosperous.
I’m a conservative, by the way, so I like asking questions
Some one mentioned the interstate hwy systeme, constructed in the 50s and 60s, as a reason for the prosperity of the time. THAT sounds like an argument in favour of gov’t intervention!
“Rosie the riveter” did not stay on the job into the 50s. When the troops came home she chucked her overalls for a crisp crinoline. In the late 40s women abandonned the workforce en masse, opting instead for a life of home and family.
My own mom, who had a very good job managing a lumber yard during WWII, has often told me of how much the women under her “command” hated their jobs. When the war ended they left the labour-force as quickly as they could. In fact, that enforced war-time “masculinity” goes a long way in explaining why womens clothing styles of the 1950s were so utterly feminine.
And no one has addressed the reason(s) why retail prices of union produced goods are little different from non-union products. Do non-union employers merely pocket the extra?
The argument about shifting manufacturing jobs off-shore in order to concentrate on the high-knowledge sectors doesn’t hold a lot of water anymore.
India, a third world country, is now the beneficiary of countless high-tech jobs, and this despite the fact that nearly all the high-tech sector is non-union.
If it’s good for this realm of activity, then it’s good for the aerospace and other knowledge-based indsutries, as well.
What competetive advantages, if any, will we still have in just 15 or 20 years time?
Demographics? In this field America isn’t doing much better than Europe. We heard that just yesterday the U.S. population reached 300,000,000, but of those some 50 million are immigrants with hidden “social costs” that countries such as France and England are only now discovering. Most of the 911 terrorists weren’t just Arabs, by the way, they were also immigrants.
We need to break the twin addictions of oil and cheap imported labour. Our gov’t and business leaders, our universitites and colleges should be putting MUCH, MUCH more emphasis on both robotics/automation and alternative energy sources.
Probleme is we’ve developed a business class that simply has no long term vision. Patience is no longer a virtue; what matters is the “rush” one obtains from quick easy profits. The bottom line is like a bottle of poppers; if the cash-flow isn’t immediate it isn’t worthwhile.
We need patience, we need to be far-sighted, we need to think things through in a substantive way, a way that will allow us to escape the box-canyon in which we may, in the near future, find ourselves.
That substantive, far-sighted reflection must be done by the private sector.
I share Kate’s conservatism, but I do not share her unbridled optimism. That doesn’t mean I’m pessimistic, just cautious. The stock-market average has become more and more disconnected from the DOMESTIC generation of wealth. The level of the Dow-Jones index certainly reflects the creation of wealth, but whose, exactly? China’s? India’s?
Finally John mentions Alternate energy.
When the shortage myth about oil is popped, prices will find a true water level.
It will take a publicly recognized swing towards electric bikes and cars and that is well underway but so far not very well known. [TonyGuitar.blogspot]
The adjustment will devastate road maintainance but will boost the economy.
Governments are working on other ways to replace oil tax revenues. = TG
JP
Maybe Rosie didn’t personally go back, but the trend after the second world war was the end of the agricultural era into the cities and I won’t quibble with you as to exactly when it happened, but we all know we’ve ended up working 24/7 and it takes 2 incomes to raise a family because the government takes a lot more in those “temporary taxes” they imposed.
“And no one has addressed the reason(s) why retail prices of union produced goods are little different from non-union products. Do non-union employers merely pocket the extra?
I think Toyota’s and Nissan’s are better than Fords and GM and they aren’t unionized. I think un-uniozed Wal-Mart is better than unionized Eaton’s was.
“The argument about shifting manufacturing jobs off-shore in order to concentrate on the high-knowledge sectors doesn’t hold a lot of water anymore.”
JP, nobody is trying to “shift” jobs. Only central planners would do that. Free marketers let the market decide who does what and where. BTW some good news for manufacturers today on Bloomberg.com: …Stocks from the so-called old economy, composed of industrial companies, led the rebound (on the Dow’s record today) Shares of Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest maker of earthmoving equipment, set the pace by almost quadrupling from the end of the bear market in October 2002.
Agree, there are some pockets in Europe doing well .. Ireland .. where they cut taxes. Old Europe is in big trouble …. France is terrified of the Polish Plumber … have a look here for stats from the dismal science:
tinyurl.com/y3ww2q
“if the cash-flow isn’t immediate it isn’t worthwhile”
JP, that’s just pure math. If someone offers you x cash now or y cash in 1o years, any math student can do the present value comparisons. Cash is important, even Liberals know that, they like it in brown envelopes.
“we need to be far-sighted”
No we don’t! We need to be entrepreneurial and try things piecemeal, trail and error works in the trades and in any other kind of business. Only arrogant politicians and utopians want to be “far-sighted”. That’s not how Darwin works; economics is no different than biology … I only recently realized.
“Who owns the wealth?”
Librano$ and their cabal of corporate families like Desmarais. We do not have an investment class in this country because it’s a sin to be an investor unless you’re part of the 2-way patronage family of Librano$.
JP
Can you tell us why unions don’t have secret ballots? I suspect it’s the same reason that Castro brags about how great a life he’s built for everyone but won’t let them vote on it.
David Brown said, “Nothing short of a full embrace of communism could stall the economy…It’s ciitzens (not politicians) that work hard, earn hard and spend plenty causing the wheels of the economy to rotate!”
Here in B.C. the common wisdom is that the lost decade of the 90’s was not the fault of an NDP gov’t, just their bad luck to be in power at the time. Likewise, a booming economy with a 4% unemployment rate and a huge skills shortage is not the result of B.C. Liberal policies, but their enviable good fortune of being in power at the right time.
David Brown and other left wing economists never realize human nature. If gov’t’s didn’t create a better climate of taxation, no one would ‘work hard or earn hard’ – nor would they be spending so freely. The B.C. Liberals are not without warts, mainly being too liberal, but they understand economics and human nature and have created a culture of prosperity and optimism.
Thanks in advance for any info – does anyone know where we can find out how much money the U.S. owes China? This thing is so complicated…
More interesting would be a graph showing the percentage of persons who are regulars on SDA by province.
B.C. weighs in heavily, I bet.
A true economist would immediately grasp whay that is likely to be so interesting. = TG
The Dow may be climbing these last few years, but the dollar which is used to price the DJIA has nowhere near the same value. Over 5 years, Bigcharts tells me that the DJIA rose by about the same amount that the USD fell against the CAD and AUD.
It’s hard to believe that people could be getting wealthier when greater and greater amounts of their money are getting drained away by foreign wars and medicare/welfare scams.
Kurt Richebacher is also sounding gloomy:
The U.S. economy has a whole variety of asset bubbles. But the housing bubble is of special importance. With its two components, the housing construction bubble and the huge equity extraction bubble, it has been predominant in driving U.S. economic growth in the past five years … But the house price inflation has collapsed under growing sales pressure. … The decisive condition for that bubble to revive … is rising house prices. In our view, though, there is no chance for this to happen, owing to the rotten state of consumer finances. Weak balance sheets tend to frustrate monetary easing … Consumer confidence may get some relief from sharply lower oil and gasoline prices, but the rapidly unraveling and much more powerful housing market keeps the economy firmly in the grip of a pronounced slowdown. Besides, the falling commodity prices most probably also reflect slower economic growth … It should also be clear that falling house prices will pull stock prices downward with them.
Well, come to think of it Richebacher always sounds gloomy – except that time a couple of years ago he was positively jovial when he told an interviewer words to this effect, “You know I almost never try to play the markets over the short term, except when the trend is so obvious that it’s impossible to go wrong – right now I’m making a ton of money shorting the US dollar.”
Last week I heard someone trying to tell one of the neo-con talk radio hosts, I think it was Hannity, that despite the Bush talking points about how great the economy is, and despite all the efforts of himself and his wife, he was personally falling farther and farther behind. This guy was from the heartland too, not from Taxachussets or the Left Coast. Hannity responded with a story about how his granddad worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 3 jobs and never complained, and therefore anyone who didn’t believe that economy is booming should “stop whining” and work harder.
What people like Chekov fail to understand is when the the dot coms went bust the indexes especially the tech indexes collapsed resulting in deflation. Trillions of dollars just weren’t there anymore. At the height of of the boom the US GDP was 18 trillion. It sank to something like 9 trillion. If you remember Oil was selling for around $10 a barrel, gold was $250 an ounce and drifting, copper was around $62 a pound. These are the big guns, and give a good indication of what the underlying economy is doing. These numbers portend a stalled economy.
Deflation is a mother to cure. Keyenes came to the conclusion that deficit spending was the only way out. Herbert Hoover the worst economic manager the White House has ever seen. Was largely responsible for the depression, having massively cut government spending and raising taxes.
What George W Bush did was essentially save the world from a second great depression. His tax cuts and massive government spending along with interest rate cuts plus the high dollar which essentially flooded the rest of the world with the US’s demand has not only taken some 600,000 million people out of abject poverty (china and India) but also propelled the world out of a looming depression.
The only thing in the end that cured the depression of the 1930’s was WW2.
As an aside if you transpose a chart of the NASDAQ index from 1990 to 2003 with a corresponding Dow Jones industrials index from the similar length of time with 1929 being the center of the chart you will find they are identical. As a matter of fact I suspect although I haven’t checked in a couple of years they are still tracking identically.
Oh and for Chekov. Congrates on being a successful business man. I am so you will know a successful money manager and trader. Who spends most of his spare time knee deep in economics so should you have any questions just ask.
PSS. My grammar and spelling suck.
“India, a third world country, is now the beneficiary of countless high-tech jobs, and this despite the fact that nearly all the high-tech sector is non-union.”
decades ago, around the indira gandhi days, there was a big push to make india self sufficient.
it didnt entirely succeed but it dint fail either. they came out of that with a superb education system with emphasis on engineering and practical skills.
thus in india you make about 20% of n americans but triple your countryment working as an outsourcer.
I know this personally 2nd hand.
Jeff, Good time to invest in Tesla Motor Co. SanFrancisco CA? Electric luxury sports car in a Lotus body.
First run of 100+ completely sold out at 90 to 100k each. $ Many next-production pre-sold.
Family model on the way too. =TG
PS. Swartzeneggar bought a Tesla at first sight.
You may have seen Arnold preaching high clean air standards for California and giving the big auto lobby a heart-attack in the same breath.
Payoff includes fewer thousands dying of athsma and lung disease in smoggy CA.
Such is the price of progress. = TG
Unions for me are the potential end of Western civilization. Today the largest pools of Capital by far are Public Service Union pension funds along with Teachers.
If one were to add the these 2 pension funds together for all fifty states what you get is a number roughy equal to US GDP. Same goes for Canada.
That would be roughly 13 Trillion in the US and about 1 Trillion in Canada.
What Unions figured out a long time ago was that they would bankrupt any company they got hold of. So they went full tilt on government. It’s possible to bankrupt a government but not easy. So off they went.
When a Teacher picks up his monthly statement from the Union what they want to see is that their pension money is getting bigger. But if you are a money manager how do you do that. It is vitually impossible to do in the stock market with the amount of money we are talking about here. There is only one place that
can absorb that kind of money. The bond market. More precisely for these peoples purposes government bonds. Government bonds pay a pretty good return relatively risk free as compared to say General Motors. Now it gets more insidious public service people give advice to politicians, actually write the laws and make policy. Teachers groom your kid on what to think. Soooo it is now well known fact to make anything right in either country we need more social programs
these social programs cost money and of course you need to hire more people to run them. Therefore you need more spending from the government. Government has to issue more bonds. Round and round we go.
I have tried to take what is really a very complex subject and way oversimplify it so you will get the idea.
Want a starting place for the numbers try CALPERS. All these pension funds have public figures.
They of coarse do invest in the stock market but so much of what goes on in our society is driven by these huge pools of Capital.
Me thinks there is a conspiracy all right but it doesn’t have much to do with the right.
TG every time I talk to you your always trying to sell me a car.
JP ponders:
“And no one has addressed the reason(s) why retail prices of union produced goods are little different from non-union products. Do non-union employers merely pocket the extra?”
Volume, I suspect, has a good deal to do with it.
Since you mentioned meats, the large corporate meat packing plants, buy everything in bulk, through a division of their own company often, or through contracts with other corporations.
The grains, the feedlot set-ups, the cattle/hog producers, are often divisions of one major corporation, or carry long term contracts.
These corporations with their own elevators and delivery systems, can buy ahead.
The feedlots, or hog barns, are tied to the meat-packing plant, with its union labor.
The independent meat-cutter would not get the same kind of deal, and I am not even so sure that his labor costs would be less.
Trained meat cutters, as with every experienced tradesman, are in especially high demand everywhere;)
Not every unionized worker would be trained to know how to cut up the whole of the dressed animal either, I would add. They stick to preparing one small portion cut, or a portion of a portion, as the cuts move along the belt.
The wage must reflect that, even if union.
The independent does not usually get into the fancy packaging end of specialty products, where the value-added charges really start to add up.
But, I found meat costs at the small local butcher in Alberta on my visits back, were less expensive without a doubt, than the independent grocers, or unionized stores in BC, so not sure where your comparisons were made.
Can you tell us why unions don’t have secret ballots? I suspect it’s the same reason that Castro brags about how great a life he’s built for everyone but won’t let them vote on it.: Nomdenet.
The answer is easy, Nomdenet, the union executives are borderline fascists!
I haven’t been to a union meeting since 1988. That one was billed as a question and answer session. The executives (about 8 or 9 of ’em) sat up front on a dias…like so many Turkish Sultans…..stern-faced, daring anyone to ask a real question. So it was an exercise in intimidation designed to cower the membership into silence; were you to advance to the front of the hall and demand why they weren’t doing more on the wage front, for instance, they’d immediately swat you down.
What was also interesting was the way in which they pushed and pushed the issue salary equity for women. Half the hall was female and so such an approach did wonders in the “divide and conquer” department.
They served coffee, weak coffee, along with boxes of stale doughnuts.
if the cash-flow isn’t immediate it isn’t worthwhile
JP, that’s just pure math.
No, Nomdenet, that’s pure greed! The Chinese, for example, understand the value of patience when it comes to doing business. They are extremely pragmatic and quite far-sighted; their economic stategies are comprehensive, co-ordinated and coherent even as the country remains nominally “communist”. They’ve even been cute enough to unionise the country’s Walmarts and Walmart, being the economic whore it is, doesn’t even mind……
I can well remember when China was like N. Korea, a god-damned basketcase. But over the past 25 years, owing to successive years of double-digit growth and sound manamgement the country has emerged as the worlds third largest economy.
I remember it surpassing Spain in the mid 90s. Then it overtook both France and England and last year, according to some reports, it nosed passed Germany.
And why not?
The Chinese have only been at this for about 5,000 years; as long or longer than even the Jewish community. To boot, this latest round of prosperity was built with our money, our technology and our know-how. We sold ’em the whole store in a breathless, short-sighted rush for quick and easy profits.
They can muster more patience (a confucian value) than Westerners ever could.
Just one thing about automation. Japan is an extremely chauvinistic culture. They refuse to allow large numbers of foreign workers to settle on their soil. Obtaining Japanese citizenship is next to impossible.
Japan’s population, though, is ageing just as fast as ours….in fact, faster than ours. But here again patience and pragmatism come into play; the temptation to import large numbers of cheap labourers and the quick profits that labour could have generated has been resisted, quashed. Japan is spending wads of money and effort on developing robotics and automation and those efforts are now beginning to pay off.
R2D2? No.
Devices, for example, that allow paraplegics to walk…”intelligent legs” if you like… that free up not just the handicapped person, but also large numbers of health-care workers ( you’ll no longer need an orderly to push you) are set to be marketed as soon as 2010. In the years following that I’ve no doubt that other more sophisticated devices will be developed and sold, devices that do all the boring grunt work, thus freeing up large numbers of workers for other more important tasks.
Meanwhile The West’s business elites, lazy to a man, import armies of cheap labour and refer to the practice as “economic strategy” or “multi-culturalism”.
Hoover wasn’t the primary cause of the depression. Increased Protectionist tariffs were the primary driver, along with a financial system that was still in its infancy and unable to cope with the run up and then crash of the stock markets in ’29.
WW2 did not end the depression, it was already over by about ’36. Their are quite a few economists who think the continuation of the New Deal after that point slowed the recovery.
The interstate highway system was government-built because at the time the private sector did not have the means – debt tools, etc. were very poorly developed at the time. Even government systems were too unsophisticated to attempt such a huge project prior to WW1. Today, the private sector would be a far better option to build it and in the UK apparently that’s what’s happening for any new big infrastructure. Gov’t’s role going forward is to provide the regulatory framework – eg – the dereg of telecom and airlines and patent and intellectual property laws.
Unionized and non-union prices are the same yes, because they are in competition for the sale. A far better point of discussion is to compare the profitability of union vs non-union firms – Westjet vs air Canada and GM vs Toyota. It is interesting to note that both GM and AC had what were thought to be unassailable positions in the marketplace not too long ago. The only significant handicap they had was a unionized workforce.
TG – when electric cars are selling at a rate of 10,000 per month and they are able to operate in temperatures below freezing I will pay them some heed. However right now they are about as practical as diamond necklaces and are bought for the same reasons – to make a fashion statement.
John:
“The West’s business elites, lazy to a man, import armies of cheap labour and refer to the practice as “economic strategy” or “multi-culturalism”.”
I thought you said you were a conservative. The business elites that I work with are anything but lazy. “Importing armies of cheap labour” was how this continent was built and it remains the key to our future especially now that we live in a post-Pill world. And it’s not like they are being brought here at the point of a gun – in fact it would take guns to send them back.
hey what’s wrong with winnipeg those panhandlers they have rights to ruin the city you know. And if we shut the down town for them it’s all for the good, right.
You were in wpg? Looser!!! oops.
Better to visit than live here like me.
Plus grand forks & fargo have like 4 murders a year between them at most and a pop of about 400k while wpg with 600k manages over 20 murders most years,…
but we have better gun control so we’re more ideologically pure!
PS Kate if you have a specific issue with WPG I would like to know.
🙂
JP, cash is neither a virtue nor a vice, it’s certainly not pure greed … cash is an economic necessity. I’m having trouble believing a conservative would say cash is greed.
Ditto, with your idea of patience. The biggest threat to China’s buraucratic central planners is that the citizens won’t be patient, particularly farmers who are not benefiting from capitalism. Was the Tiananmen Massacre your idea of farsightedness and “their economic strategies are comprehensive, co-ordinated and coherent even as the country remains nominally “communist”? China is now capitalist, by definition capitalism is not “comprehensive, co-ordinated or coherent” it is in a constant state of flux as it adapts to the daily supply/demand curves of production and consumers.
I’ve been to Shanghai, believe me, that is a young vibrant population that is just as much the “now “society as we are; they love wearing their DKNY clothing, driving Audis and they aren’t patient consumers.
I can’t figure out whether you admire China and want to embrace it into the Western world or if you want to return it to isolation. I’m with Nixon, I think embracing it makes sense so that capitalism will lead it to democracy and the world will thus be safer.
Gord, I’m fully aware that immigrants built the country. However, todays immigration has nothing to do with that of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those immigrants were homesteaders; they cleared the land, founded communities and relied on no one but themselves for their food, their homes and their incomes.
The present immigration policy of the States is suicidal. The uncontrolled Hispanic migrations to the Southwest, for example, are a time bomb. Does anyone seriously think that this massive migration won’t be followed up by territorial claims, or demands for political autonomy, sovereignty-association?
Short-sighted greed has set into motion a whole dynamic that could well become unstopable. Demands for bilingual services in hospitals, education facilites and clinics will mean that hispanics will be favoured. The dwindling anglos of the Southwest, as a rule, can’t speak spanish, and so most of those jobs will go to hispanophone newcomers. When that benchmark is reached, “conquered”, the demands for spanish language services….translation etc…. will reach right up to the federal level in Washington. I could even see the day where spanish will be considered an official language.
All of this being aided and abbetted by clueless do-gooder leftists……
Now add to this mix the teensy fact that large areas of America’s Southwest were once part of Mexico/New Spain and the cocktail becomes explosive.
The space occupied by old-stock anglo Ammericans is contracting before our very eyes, and that contraction will have a profound and unforseen impact on everything in both the public and private sectors.
My ancestors came here, integrated into the culture, adopted the mores, the behavior and the language of the majority. My grandfather, who was born in Canada, even refused to teach my father polish; he felt that doing so would just hinder my dad’s assimilation.
Those days are long gone.
If you want to create a bit of a blog scoop, someone should speak to folks in Grand Forks and Fargo and ask 2 questions:
(1) How many Manitobans come down here for diagnostic imaging and other medical tests?
(2) How many Manitobans commute from across the border to work in GF?
’nuff said.
Tex
“Guess that means they are communist countries.”
They’re well on the way.
“Problem is now (today) the old time unions are no longer in step with current economics”
No, the problem is that unions are no better than the thugs they were implemented to replace.
“Here’s a classic, when I lived in Pennsylvania, all of the liquor/wine stores were state owned.”
They still are. It burns my *ss.
And housing bubble, schmousing bubble. How many years have we been hearing the doom and gloom on that one?
Turk just when do you think they began to build all those uniforms helmets rifles bullets ships tanks heavey guns planes of varying shapes and sizes not to mention the kabillion other odds and ends you need to fight a war.
The last time I checked a tariff is a tax one of many varing types.
Jeff,
A car that does not burn $400 a month in gas . . . pays for itself. Economics? = TG