Some rambling on the economy

I'm no expert when it comes to economics - I took a couple of undergrad courses in the subject when I was in college 40 years ago and I read the occasional article in Time magazine or on the Internet, but I still have my opinions and I guess I fall mostly on the "demand side" of the supply and demand debate. It just seems to me that the US became the world's great economic superpower when we developed a fairly wealthy middle class that could afford to buy stuff being produced in our factories.

So that is my opinion as I waded into this brief video that is a week or two old...



So you see, it looks to me like the investors and market traders have it wrong. They want government to stop spending - to cut unemployment, to stop works projects, to deny aid to states and local governments and maybe even, some of them, to reduce the military. Their point, best as I can tell is to have millions more people out of work and hungry so that they will take jobs paying minimum wage - not just to freeze personal income levels in the U.S., but to actually lower them so that we can hire as cheaply here as they do in China.

There's some logic to that - it might add more jobs to our economy - but the jobs will only pay subsistence wages. The demand for other goods - things like personal entertainment, new cars, decent clothes, etc. will decline. Business will fall off. I can't see how their plan helps them in the long run.

I just think that conservatives like Santelli are batshit crazy.