aarc

Preview from Europe: Fed Steps in with Guns Blazing

What an irony of your linked pictures.

The objective: A home for every Amercian.

The result: Lots of and lots of empty expensive houses foreclosed or abandoned. Increasing number of jobless and homeless Americans with tent cities sprouting all over the place.

That is the result of an economic agenda that focuses on providing housing while neglecting business.

America and Europe embarked on this mega-housing project while throwing away their profit-making businesses to China, India and other developing countries and practically turning their noses from the Tech Industry after the dotcom fiasco. Technology companies are supposed to suppliment the manufacturing industry which was suffering from high labor costs and cannot compete to cheap labor from the developing countries. This two-pronged (mis)approach resulted with less than adequate sources of income needed to sustain a vastly increased amount of expensive assets such as mcMansions many Americans gorge themselves into.

Plus... a never-ending unproductive and vastly expensive "little" wars in Iraq and Afganistan - perfect additional ingredient for an economic paralysis. More tonnage of bombs dropped into Iraq than the whole WWII? Plus all those aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, seek-and-destroy helicopters, robocop soldiers, etc. looking for a handful of terrorists. Too expensive, is it not?

Just trying to point out which is more important. Housing or business entrepreneurship? Fancy house with no income does not match as we now know. As soon as the potential complete meltdown of the economy got arrested and stop gap measures are implemented to prevent joblessness from getting worse; it is time to have a hard look again at Technology since manufacturing can't possibly compete yet with cheap or rather "getting cheaper now!" labor from China and India. America needs a "new" source of income aside from the (now dysfunctional) financials and retail in order to pay up for the excessive depts being incurred now.

The sooner business entrepreneurship becomes the primary focus of national economic recovery; the faster new jobs will be created that will be needed for an effective or self-sustaining economic recovery.

How about war on terrorism? Is it really needed to keep the bombs (soldiers) vs. terrorists or use the less expensive but maybe more effective intelligence (police) vs. terrorists? The more money re-directed back into the economy, the better off the economy can recover. The military won't mind helping the country recover from this economic crisis by drastically reducing hardware expenses without risking defence by involving the military personel more on in-expensive training rather than actual combat, will they? The military has more than enough hardware capability to fight the Whole Wide World if that is what becomes necessary in a MAD+MAD scenario. How many enemies does America has right now and might have in the next 10 or 20 years time?