🚀 go-pugleaf

Not that this has anything to do with miscellaneous science,but he's
talking about me.

In article <4724@shemp.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU> gunzler@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU (Mitch Gunzler) writes:
>
>   Since when is the trade deficit an argument against "the prosperity
>of our age?"  We have a trade deficit because we consume more of other
>countries produce than they want of ours; this isn't prosperity?

Not if they don't want our stuff because it isn't as good as theirs. My
argument is that 7% unemployment and a declining middle class isn't
prosperity, and that the trade deficit is a symptom of our recent inability
to (buzzword) compete. Remember when "Made in Japan" meant "inferior", and
when 5% unemployment was a cause for alarm? Some people are doing very well
these days, no doubt, but too many aren't.

>   (Actually, the current deficit corresponds quite closely to foreign
>purchases of U.S. Treasury paper; that is, the debt we are aquiring
>outside our borders is not representative of some fundamental economic
>imbalance, but is an explicit loan from them to us.  How did you think
>we managed to double our budget without raising taxes?  Everyone in
>the world has been buying our paper - because we've offered ridiculously
>high rates, approaching 20% on long term bills.)
>   (Calculate the return on a 19% investment after 30 years sometime,
>and compare it to, say, 15%.)

Great. They sell us what they make, then lend us back the money at usurious
rates. We doubled our budget primarily by inflation and borrowing, not by
expanding the economy. We do have to pay back those loans, you know.

>   All of which is to say, if the person who was deriding the value of
>business training had had some, he might have realized that a trade
>deficit, per se, does not suggest a lack of prosperity.
>

You know nothing about me. How do you know what "training" I've had?
I was not deriding the value of REAL business training, only the academic
kind, where you don't deal with real people and real money. I did not mean to
imply that the trade deficit meant anything more than what I say above. I should
have made myself clearer.