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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;World Colonial, post: 2410150, member: 78153&quot;]What Buffet has never said to my knowledge is that much of this &quot;growth&quot; in GDP (per capita and aggregate) is the result of an unsustainable credit mania and waste.&nbsp; GDP is actually only a measure of transactional turnover in monetary terms, not an accurate measure of changes in living standards.&nbsp; Moreover given his politics, he is certainly aware of the current lopsided income and wealth distribution and that the majority of people are worse off now than they were going back to at least 1999. </p><p><br /></p><p>In the backwards mirror of economic statistics, the more the US spends on medical care, &quot;education&quot;, housing and 70% of the world&#039;s lawyers, the larger the GDP.&nbsp; There is little if any correlation between this spending and a productive or improving economy or rising living standards.&nbsp; You don&#039;t get &quot;richer&quot; by paying more for something that others are buying for less.</p><p><br /></p><p>The only thing preventing the decline in living standards obvious is artificially cheap credit and absurdly low credit standards, caused by price fixing and moral hazard.&nbsp; This enables people to buy and finance things they otherwise cannot afford and for the government to pay for &quot;guns and butter&quot; at the same time.&nbsp; The day central banks lose control over interest rates (at the latest) is when living standards will better reflect what most people can actually afford.</p><p><br /></p><p>To that, you can add more outsourcing, more offshoring and more automation which will continue to decrease both the number of jobs and wages.&nbsp; The distribution of most productivity gains and essentially free financing for leveraged speculation all but continues to assure that the lopsided proportion of people will benefit at most marginally (if at all) from any future &quot;growth&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have and continue to expect that most Americans will continue to become poorer or a lot poorer over the indefinite future.&nbsp; The same applies most everywhere else.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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