No, and that's a major, and common, misunderstanding of the situation. Our exports matter. If we cut off imports, those things we now export would lose their export markets and would not, for the most part, find replacement markets in the US. So most of those jobs, and those sales, would just be lost.
The friction in the system would lead to a long slump before we would recover. According to many trade experts of both liberal and conservative persuasions, we would NEVER recover. Without large volumes of trade, our economic activity would find a new steady-state far lower than the present one. We'd be a second-rate economy, if we had an economy at all.
Our imports matter, too. As Richard pointed out, quoting from his research paper, a great deal of domestic economic activity results from importing products and services from abroad, selling and distributing them, warehousing them, marketing them, etc.
So the net actually is secondary. It's the total amount of trade activity that matters most. Virtually all modern economists have agreed on this point, except when they get into politics.
Extended periods of negative trade balance have negative effects. But they're not necessarily what most people think they are.
============ Most unfortunately there are no more major "American" companies, only trans/supra national corporations that more-or-less as an accident of history are domiciled in the US.
No matter how thin you slice the baloney, it's still baloney. If things are going so well, why are the community pantries running out of food, why do we have an "official" unemployment rate c. 10%, and millions of people losing their homes? Why did gold just hit 1,875$US/oz?
Who are you going to believe? Your own eyes or the New York Times, the BLS and Forbes?
Sometimes that's true. Every nickel and every life spent in Iraq dissapeared - and for what?
This?
When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation's oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba'ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today's "free Iraq." In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to "liberate" the Iraqi people.
a.. Continue reading In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.
Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to "pay back" the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.
The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of "liberation" speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.
You mean to say that the primary loyalty of the members of the Chinese politburo remains with the "middle kingdom," and they aren't team players in the new global economy and citizens of the "brave new world order?" What a bunch of ingrates - making/enforcing policy designed to put the interests of China first...
This is the Rogoff of Reinhart and Rogoff that wrote _This Time Things Are Different_
SPIEGEL: Does the US also need another stimulus program? Larry Summers, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, says that cutting back on government spending in the middle of a downturn will kill economic growth and employment.
Rogoff: People asking for a fiscal stimulus are looking at the wrong model. They think this is just a big, but typical, recession. But it is not. Policymakers need to focus on relieving overextended private balance sheets in the short run, and stabilizing public debt in the long run. A fiscal stimulus cannot be the main solution. It may provide temporary relief, but there will be no traction without some normalization of private debt levels. In Europe, of course, government debt itself needs to be sharply written down in some countries. The US will eventually come to the realization that something similar has to happen to some mortgages. Homeowners who accept this relief will have to make some significant concession, perhaps giving away some future appreciation if home prices go up.
Bank of America has so far written down and refi'd more than 100,000 mortgages, George. Some of the funds are part of a program run by the Fed. Some are from Treasury and the balance is out of pocket for them.
Similarly, in 2007 a group of the to big to fail guys began buying mortgages out of bonds and just forgiving them. Everyone that had shorted the market raised holy hell and it stopped the effort.
Household balance sheets are coming back in line. Read This "After the Fall" . Carmen and Vincent Reinhart
A big azz stimulus program, targeted at future jobs, and our place on this earth in 10 years would be awesome. But if they had one it would just temporarily keep people off the unemployment line for 6 months, because they would do it for today, not tommorrow.
--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.