yes, i really fear that obama may not preserve the prosperity and fiscal responsibility of the Bush era
Obama or no Obama I think that it is now inescapable that we will have to collectively take our medicine for the excesses of the past several years. Time for men to be men again, maybe in the long run it will even turn out to be a good thing and bring some character back to a nation of foppish superficial lemmings distracted 24/7 by all manner of silly nonsense, Paris Hilton etc. The greatest generation paid dearly for its title, hopefully current generations will not have to sacrifice nearly as much, but character and integrity need to make a comeback, maybe more so than the economy.
Maybe we need to face the fact that the economy iis like an old house. Now that the walls have shown cracks, we look into the foundation and find ground rot and heavy termite damage. Rather than spend all of our money to prevent the old house from falling down, perhaps we should accept that it cannot be saved... and preserve our capital to build a new house... Politicians are expected to heed the cries of the hoi polloi and "do something"... and they certainly don't want to hear "it's too far gone already best thing would be to just let the house go and rebuild new"... The Gummint is trying to prevent the housing market from seeking its "natural level of value"... to preserve spending at the high level of the last few years, and to preserve the ever rapidly expansion of credit. All wrong, I think.
Not only wrong but perhaps not even possible. The cure may eventually be worse than the disease, did you see the loan mods that are being done, $1M at 1% 5 year ballooon, $878 a month, just pushing the problem on down the road, in the mean time the bank is borrowing TARP money against that "performing" loan.
More than Half of the ET members voted for the clown. More than half of America voted for Obama. So, let them get what they want. Just prepare your self for the coming storm. It will not last forever.
I think most people on here just enough economics to carry out a trade. The situation we have here has a directional lean towards deflation...and that is the last thing you want. If you will criticize Obama's plan, may I hear your otherwise brilliant plan? Obama's plan may not be the best, but it's the best we got right now. Let's not get too comfortable with seeing the unemployment numbers as simply numbers, they are way more than numbers...they're people/families. If you're worried about the super-power status...I personally think your worries are misplaced. Other countries are printing money to prop up their economy...perhaps you should travel, or watch a little BBC or whatever access you have to places across the pond. Germany just failed at raising money in a bond auction...I think that speaks loud enough. I'll bet my account that the Dollar comes out of this on top. I'll also mention that you're not much of a super-power if your unemployment number is through the roof, and this plan has a chance to hold off the job slide.
They don't because it doesn't. I don't know what being in the engineering market is, but I am an actual Electrical engineer and a CFA. And while it may use 0.30 cents in electricity, buying it is not free. Lets say it cost $100K in capital to replace one person (I worked at Toyota and GM, this cost is very conservative and reasonable). Then you need people to clear it when it jams or faults out. And don't say "we are advanced enough to not make it jam". Fortune 500 companies are into making profit so they buy the cheapest materials they can produce product efficiently with and they have variance. When you have thousands of these robots working one after the other, if one robot can't operate because of a material problem or a defect somewhere... they all starve. So you have 100K in capital... and lets say you have 1 person watching 10 robots and he gets paid 80K after benefits (reasonable considering the knowledge he needs, normally an electrician at most factories). That is a lot more than 30 cents an hour... without even factoring in parts for preventative maintenance, or the lifecycle of the robot. Then you have the cost of 100K at lets say 7% cost of capital. That 7K in cost of capital is more than 30 cents an hour... So why put the robots here? You have entrepreneurs with capital who can just put then in a low cost nation. America LOSES, you just can't compete with an over populated country. Knowledge moves and it will be a slow decline. Globalization with respect to manufacturing is equivalent to osmosis in science. The capital will move to whereever it is cheapest since there really are no borders (tariffs).
@ThiagoAvila there is an initial cost to purchasing them, but this cost will be reduced once we advance our knowledge in this field and produce robots in greater numbers also there will be options where companies can lease them instead of purchasing them, and with the lease they can get free 24 hr support so a company leases one for 1K a month, and energy consumption costs 1$ per hour per robot, running the robots 24/7 would cost the company ~1700$ for each one, that is pretty good considering the fact that they are working round the clock