PS... I don't deny that a subset of the US economy/workforce got hit really hard in 2008 and never recovered. But when you look at the US economy as a whole things are doing quite well.
To be more accurate, when you look at the propaganda spewed by the mainstream media, everything seems to be fine, because they keep spinning everything in a positive light.
In the US, for starters, there's a huge bubble in stocks, and an echo bubble in housing. There's a massive property bubble in Canada and Australia, and so on.
With interest rates already at roughly zero, they don't have room for lowering them to "stimulate" the economy (to avoid the inevitable crash that's coming).
Of course, getting people to spend money they don't have and businesses to start projects they shouldn't, isn't exactly good for the economy but hey.. whatever keeps the show going for a while longer.
(Downvoters? It's at the very least possible that you just don't know that I'm right.. :) Do your homework, but not from mainstream media sources)
I mean, if you at least supplied some links to the data that you think support your view, that would make for a much more worthwhile post.
So when you point out that the king has no clothes, naturally you get downvoted.
The current mess of the US economy is due to the choices of many politicians, in congress and the presidency, from both parties. Neither party should get a passing grade in this regard.
This is why we need the government out of the economy, and let it work. Hell if it weren't for government the bad banks would have failed in 2008-- and we would have had a real recovery afterwards.
It's because of our system of government. This talk about the government being the problem, causing harm to the economy, really irritates me - the American economy owes its very existence to the American government and the private property protections it offers in the forms of regulations, legal system, social welfare programs, public education, military, etc etc etc.
If you can't stomach the sausage making in the US without losing respect for all the greatness it permits, just stop paying attention and vote for whoever says what feels right, that's the American way.
Your italicized real recovery sounds like another adrenaline boost in the arm, rather than the robust, sustainable recovery that is actually occurring.
I'm not taking any position against your overall point, and I do think there are many (relatively) uniquely American policies that historically have paid wonderful dividends; but you're vastly underestimating the exogenous geographic advantages of America (and I'm not sure if you're doing this, but most people tend to overestimate how long global American hegemony has existed).
We're sitting on 50% of the world's navigable internal waterways, overlaid over by the world's largest piece of contiguous farmland[1]. We've got ports that allow easy direct shipping access to most of the rest of the world's economy (Western Europe and China/Japan/India; We also have easy direct shipping access to South America and Africa, but those have naturally been less important). We've got enormous natural borders with the rest of the powers that were most recently useful in the fact that we've had the luxury of staying out of the incredibly catastrophic wars of the rest of the world more or less until we decided to enter[2] (and to the degree that we decide to enter). Those also enabled us to escape essentially 100% of the physical destruction of those wars.
[1] https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-... This is an excellent article with a lot more depth than the couple of stats I referenced; there's also a part 2 that I recommend reading.
[2] Obviously less true for Pearl Harbor, but still true to an extent: consider the impact of a surprise attack for Germany -> France as opposed to for Japan -> US. Crossing the Pacific is infinitely harder than crossing Belgium.
> It's because of our system of government.
No, it's because of the relative freedom you enjoyed in the past. Strangely enough, the less of the fruits of people's labour you forcefully take away from them, the more motivated they are to produce.
The easier it is to do business, the more business will be done. Go figure.
There's a reason people were flocking to America from all over the world, and it wasn't to get horribly oppressed by filthy capitalist "Robber Barons".
We would - but at the price of a much worse crash. (Which doesn't mean that the result, today, would have been any better - the further down the bottom was, the better the recovery has to be to reach the same point.)
Don't pay much attention to the political circus though, the false choice between "Demopublicans". That's all smoke and mirrors to make you think you have a say in how you're "governed" (i.e. coerced).
> The current mess of the US economy is due to the choices of many politicians, in congress and the presidency, from both parties.
It's much deeper than that. The dollar was detached from the gold standard in 1971, and that was the beginning of "the real end". Before that, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 set the scene for all the economic trouble to come, and so on. Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk
> This is why we need the government out of the economy, and let it work.
You're on the right track, but take it further. We need the government out of existence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngpsJKQR_ZE .. it is based on extortion, after all.
What maintains governments is the belief in political authority: http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf
> Hell if it weren't for government the bad banks would have failed in 2008-- and we would have had a real recovery afterwards.
That's certainly true.
The median PE ratio of S&P 500 stocks at the moment is $14. That's certainly not "bubble" territory. The current market correction is surprising nobody, but I don't think many people consider this a bubble (at least for the US markets).
Now there are certainly subsectors within the US that could be in bubble territory and could get hit really hard... unrealistically valued tech stocks being one of them. But again, across the whole US economy things are alright.
S&P 500 P/E ratio was (until last week) around 19. The more accurate Shiller P/E was closer to 27.
Way above the historical median.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-26/the-s-p-50...