people hate reading *feces* thats true

Sweet! I'm there. Calvin and Hobbs sent me.

I think he's saying that our economic outlook is so *feces*ty right now it's affecting our collective psyches to the point that we're noticing the gloom in all aspects of life--whether it's in sports, entertainment, weather, etc.

Google and Apple are two of a select group of companies experience big growth despite hard economic times domestically. I would imagine that strong global sales is part of the reason. Sure, their employees are loving life, but not every company is a Google or an Apple. Those two companies combined represent about 40K employees. That's just noise. GM employs 266K. Ford employs 246K. Citibank employs 374K. BofA employs 209K. You think all of these employees are as sanguine about the economy as you are?

(BTW, I'm surprised you even mentioned TiVo because that is not a profitable company. They've been bleeding red ink for most of their existence. I can see TiVo going BK in less than 5 years unless some global electronics giant buys them out.)

As for standard of living, there are only so many high paying bean counter jobs out there. The way I see it, you simply can't have lots of high paying jobs without many more low paying jobs to go with them. Loss of wage-grade manufacturing jobs cannot be viewed as an opportunity to create more service sector jobs. IMHO, over-reliance on the service sector will be the bain of our economy. All the money made in the service sector simply represents money being shuffled back and forth within the country. There's no net gain of prosperity unless you sell *feces* other countries want to buy. With no net gain and a whole lot of shuffling, the result is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Outnumbered by the gloomers again.  I'm used to it here.

I am not advocating a 'service economy' - never did.  I'm advocating new markets, creating new opportunities, etc.

Let me ask - with manufacturing jobs generally unable to keep pace with our standard of living increase demands - what do you expect ANYONE to do about it?  You simply cannot enforce a largely manufacturing base of jobs when global competition has you competing with countries with 1/100th of our living standards.  And you cannot tariff it and you cannot block it without damaging our purchasing power into what would be non-increasing standards of living.

I'm not advocating an abandonment of manufacturing by any stretch - just making the case that it cannot be our savior.  It cannot be what we lean on like we have in the past.  We need new markets... more innovation... more smart people...  (sheesh, I'm getting as repetitive as the gloom stories  )

And yes, I believe we can do it.  Especially if we stop crying over spilled milk and realize there's more milk where that came from.

Or you can take a more global look at things - a rising tide raises all boats.  With other countries benefiting from newer manufacturing jobs, they will also begin to......... increase their standard of living.  A few more generations and they may be where we were - and we can go right back to competing for those jobs.  We can drop ourselves down to the living standards the rest of the world enjoys (or suffers).  OR, we can create new markets and retain our high standards by being innovative.  Hell, some of those new markets may even include some local manufacturing 


Bah - I'll just delete the rest.  Two long paragraphs whacked for your brevity pleasure.

"Who is Ayn Rand?"

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