Us is downgraded to aa+

You should be aware that Bob Prechter has been saying the economy was in, or about to enter a depression since about 1990. And his long-standing target for the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been about 1,000 for a couple of decades. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and the followers of Prechter have not fared well.

 

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That was right around the time when we were actually starting to see the ill-effects of the outsourcing of our production of goods to the Asian and third-world economies, Cloud. We saw it right on the product labels in the stores. Today, the Western economies are reduced to warehouses for foreign goods, principally. I may not know much, but I can add two and two together. That's the real problem: most of the economic growth is overseas, these days.

 

Those who listened to Prechter and stayed out of the market forfeited a lot of gains over the past couple of decades. I agree with what you said, but Prechter isn't a fundamentalist and probably never thought the way you do. The US is still a huge food producer for the world, has a major domestic oil-gas-coal energy industry, was the engine for the internet revolution and iPads, is the world's foremost researcher into new pharmceuticals, has world-class manufacturers like Boeing, etc... This isn't enough, and there is much work to do to force businesses and politicians to enact the legislation [e.g., tarriffs] needed to grow domestic industry again, but the economic power and recovery potential of the US should never be underestimated.

 

Should'a voted for Chuck Norris.

 

Darn good points, Cloud. For one, I don't know how I could have forgotten about our agriculture. We're still in a spot, though, and, I'm glad we can both see that. Paradoxical thing is, it was largely our industriousness and ingenuity that brought many of those foreign economies out of the darkness, so to speak, and, look at what we have to show for that, indebtedness to them. Something is wrong, there.

 

This isn't political...it's just fact. We have the best education, information access, and productivity of anytime in recorded history! World markets are opening up, and democracy is spreading. There's NO REASON why we shouldn't be hitting on all cylinders.

Our problem is that we're hog-tied by a 100 year old Federal Income Tax code that's hopelessly corrupt. Fix that, you fix the economy.