Sorry Conservatives, but Obama looks like he has this one in the bag

[Kope]

Originally Posted by radditsu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

People seem to forget that most of our trading partners in the world are in a recession as well. Even China's growth is slowing, they are shifting domestic spending into overdrive to hide that fact / to spur on their 15% annual GDP growth as they have seen in the past few years. I would not be suprised if they have already shrunk to 3-5% GDP and are hiding it with trillions upon trillions of infrastructure improvements. Spain, Greece, UK, Ireland, Italy...well everybody outside of India, Germany, and Some Asian countries economies are shrinking. Domestic consumption can't absorb these export hits. It is death by 1000 cuts.
The only real thing our government can do is invest in education/infrastructure, and ride out the Ebb in the European/Asian markets. Our foreign oil consumption has dropped by 20% since George W left. In 20 years we will be distributing oil to other countries instead of being one of the largest consumers of oil. Much like Russia is experiencing right now. If we continue to invest in other forms of energy consumption, we will have one more great boom producing fossil fuels for emerging economies. Hopefully by then we will have the federation and warp drive and replicators and shit.

Actually I've also heard a few people propose we transition to a type of "selling advancement and maintanence" economy.

We would sell technological advancements to countries and charge them for upkeep to a degree, but we would put almost all of our investments into R&D. I actually love this idea but I honestly don't see how it would be sustainable for long periods of time once people start getting caught up, unless we really develop technologies at an astronomical rate.

[radditsu]

Originally Posted by Kope [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Actually I've also heard a few people propose we transition to a type of "selling advancement and maintanence" economy.

We would sell technological advancements to countries and charge them for upkeep to a degree, but we would put almost all of our investments into R&D. I actually love this idea but I honestly don't see how it would be sustainable for long periods of time once people start getting caught up, unless we really develop technologies at an astronomical rate.

This would only work if we invest in education /technology now. Countries already have a head start with full fiber optic networks setup from the ground up, while we are STILL trying to keep a slow copper infrastructure now. Most telecom companies do not want to spend the money to upgrade our core at this time. Remember Comcast in the early 2000s? They spent a GIANT nut on infrastructure, immediately went bankrupt, and wiped that debt out. <3 the bankruptcy laws about 12 years ago.