The Economy can't keep on growing forever

Debatable, but irrelevant.

It is non-Marxists who are idiots. They invent arguments where no argument exists.

We hear this thinking a lot from Marxists who deny that most employees are employed by corporations which are owned by shareholders --but then again a lot of left-wingers are unemployed and on welfare anyway so they really don't know anything about working w/ money to begin with.[/QUOTE]
No they aren't. But you apparently have a deep need to offend and hold yourself in higher esteem, sorta like trump does with his narcissism. Lots of right wingers spew what they know nothing about, but they pretend. BTW, did you respond to my post that you quoted? It doesn't look like it. What I said remains true and unchallenged. Do you have anything to say about it?

 

Any wage hike in a market-economy depends upon the characteristics of that economy. Just because it happened before does not mean necessarily that it would be obliged to happen again.

But there is a reason why it could happen. Which is because the economy is showing signs of super-heating. Meaning that prices are rising and - sooner or later - Demand will fail to want to follow blindly price-hikes just because people think that prices rise forever automatically.

The US today is in for a rude-awakening because some cost-factors are approaching limits. That of the cost of competent laborers at the bottom-end is one. At the top-end, skilled professionals will feel less the squeeze even if forced to look for another job - and particularly for as long as the US continues on its Technology Boom. (Which is more than likely despite the fact that housing prices are sky-high.)

Million-dollar houses are no longer eye-openers ...

 

Open your mind instead of your politics...all of my comments are about if the US increases immigration, GDP will also increase. This is simple and does not involve 'moving people from B to A'? It is impossible for the US to increase GDP significantly without access to more labor...where do you propose to find this labor? Also note that a labor shortage is one of the reasons to expand automation and robotics. Increasing immigration does not imply bringing in bad people? Whether we allow 150 immigrants or 3 million it is imperative to maintain a responsible process to weed out certain people. We do this today with green card holders for high tech companies!

 

Today the US has a labor shortage so it's obvious to me if we add more labor GDP will increase...

 

Technology is the driver of economic growth. It is possible that technological growth will stagnate, but there is no sign of that happening in the near future.

 

I do agree with but not completely. The economy will grow forever but not with the same rhythm. for some analysts, near zero growth economy is a stagnant or depressed economy.

 

Over the long-term, yes, but not on the shorter term timescales. Hardly a good idea to be basing most of a county's economic policies on that.

 

But it's predicted the country will have a surplus of lower skilled labor.
Isn't that true due to forecasted automation?

We're going to have a huge problem of dealing with all the low-skill workers we already have.

(And I sure hope it's not just an issue of workers being expected to have more skills, without paying them more)

 

Then again, a million dollars isn't what it used to be, and it's common in many high-price cities for the land alone underneath the house to be worth half a million.

This isn't necessarily indicative of better quality of living.

 

That's not necessarily true, because the inflation basket they use includes things out of proportion to what Americans actually spend money on.

Inflation is actually a very difficult thing to objectively and quantitatively measure. There's no universal definition of it that could be derived from statistically available indicators.

 

I agree, and I would like to see the smirk on owner faces when the next realty crunch rears its ugly head ...

 

Yes, indeed! Let's look a real incomes corrected for inflation. Pew Research has done that bit of work, and here is the result:

Not quite the same result is it ... ?

 

We have to do long-term policies not short-term policies. We are talking about whether the economy can grow forever, which is a long-term scale discussion.

Maybe what you mean is that economies can't grow forever, like every single year in a row without any recessions. Australia has gone 27 years without a recession, but they have much slower growth.

The way I see it, technological growth drives productivity growth, and productivity growth drives GDP growth. One reason why wage growth and GDP growth has been so slow post-recession is because productivity growth has slowed down a lot according to economists.

 

Your chart shows purchasing power increasing during the recession, are you sure that is right?

 

Do you see the greyed vertical bars in the chart? They denote recessionary periods.

Look at the very last bar to the right. It is the recessionary period that lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 (officially). In that period, the US layed-off permanently the least paid, which is why the average hourly wage increased!

My point, however, was not this. It was to say that if you are looking for "improvement" in America's lifestyle, well it hasn't been around for quite a while. And, under Replicant control, this country will not be recuperating any time soon.

For recuperation to happen, we need a decent minimum wage that allows people to actually spend-money which boosts hammered-economies but keeps even the good ones going. Moreover - AND I DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I MUST REPEAT IT IN THIS "ECONOMICS" DEBATE FORUM - Income Disparity is an economic plague like a cancer upon the economy.

All that money going to 0.1% of the population (the rich and super-rich) returns to the economy as financial-placements (like US bonds). Excessively High Income* should be taxed and spent to educate our children in the challenge posed by the Information Age - where a post-secondary degree is not a "nice thing to have" but an absolute necessity for an American family's basically decent lifestyle ...

Uncle Sam needs another billionaire like he needs a hole in the head ...

*And what is excessively high income? Any sum of income beyond $1.5 million a year. Which, with adequate death-taxes upon accumulated "savings", could be returned as well to Fiscal Spending. Only a small-part should return to heirs who do not deserve it and, in many cases, simply waste it.

 

Have you considered that the regulatory burden is also damaging the economy? Its estimated to be in the trillions. The tax and regulatory burden makes it very hard for small businesses to survive, reducing entrepreneurship in the US and helping big corporations dominate.
https://cei.org/content/costs-and-burden-federal-regulations-reach-19-trillion

 

ALL labor needs to be trained!

ALL lower skilled labor has the potential to become higher skilled labor.

Workers are compensated based on supply and demand as it pertains to each job description. For example, to a farmer, a manual laborer is worth far more than a PhD candidate...all workers need to find their niche and realize whatever compensation works for them...

 

Easier said than done.

Oh I don't know about that...

 

Hmmm. And what economical principle states that?

 

More to the point: recession is coming, but capitalism isn’t the culprit; the Treasury is, specifically, the Federal Reserve.

Here’s a truth, printing money doesn’t create value. Indeed, it is the creation of value that makes money neccessary. The Fed has spent 10yrs printing phony bills, reality is about to demonstrate the folly of that charade.

https://fee.org/articles/here-comes...ARFkP09zX9HVY9rwv_uW0F_bSg9etw&_hsmi=71146727

 

Theoretically, if the Fed only paid actual real market value for new assets and debt it bought, it wouldn't create inflation.

It's a finer subtler point people often do not understand. Printing money does not necessarily create inflation, it's how much money the Central Bank gives away when there's a gap between what they put in their Reserve Assets and what they paid. Expanding the money supply by, say, 10% isn't going to create 10% inflation. It might be somewhere more like 2%, for example.

Obviously when the Fed is trying to save the government from having to pay higher interest rates on its debt, that is going to create inflation.

 

That’s a lot razzle-dazzle just to simply say: Printing money without value to back it up will create inflation. As is about to be demonstrated once again.

 

In some sense yes.
The reserve assets on the Fed's balance sheet are in some ways like "backing", if you want to view it that way, though it's a little more complicated.

Not going to get into a discussion about the specifics here since it's started arguments in the past.

The basic point is that when the Fed "pays" for something (trying to work it's "magic" in the economy), rather than carrying out its normal function, it carries an inflationary cost. It's very difficult to try to manipulate things in the economy without that having an inherent inflationary cost.

 

It's basic intuitive logic.

Think about it. If someone finishes a race in a record 60 seconds, the next person breaks that record and finishes in 50 seconds, and then the record is broken again by someone else who completes it in 40 seconds, obviously that pattern can't continue on forever.

There are inherent limits to human productivity.

(Although with robots and artificial intelligence, who knows, but that's still likely to lead to unemployment problems and resulting lower productivity overall, somehow I doubt it will be a utopia)

 

Reality has limits. Hmmm. But apparently not Fed’s power to print money.

Ayn Rand: “
“Inflation” is defined in the dictionary as “undue expansion or increase of the currency of a country, esp. by the issuing of paper money not redeemable in specie” (Random House Dictionary). It is interesting to note that the word “inflated” is defined as “distended with air or gas; swollen.”

This last is not a coincidence: in regard to social issues, “inflation” does not mean growth, enlargement or expansion, it means an “undue”—or improper or fraudulent—expansion. The expansion of a country’s currency (which, incidentally, cannot be perpetrated by private citizens, only by the government) consists in palming off, as values, a stream of paper backed by nothing but promises (or hot air) and getting actual values, the citizens’ goods or services, in return—until the country’s wealth is drained. A similar activity, in private performance, is the passing of checks on a non-existent bank account. But, in private performance, this is regarded as a crime—and most people understand why such an activity cannot last for long.

Today, people are beginning to understand that the government’s account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread—and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/inflation.html

As to your race story; history says your wrong, i.e., records are always broken. As to what “forever” says, it will an eternity to find out—and that, my friend, is an infinity of opportunities to do so.