Watch those instruments!

[MorkandMindy]

I was watching a youtube from a plane flying over NYC and struck by the size and beauty of the city, and the huge amount of assets there and the huge amount of effort builders had put into making this a great and beautiful nation.


And then with this election coming up of how little effort people put into choosing a President for the country so many people have put so much work into.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Detroit and various car assembly plants around it were once hives of activity, now most are deserted, and the reason is bad policies, right from the top.

People make excuses, it wasn't the government it was the high cost of manufacturing in America, it was inevitable it would all be moved out to other countries. And then the houses in much of Michigan lost a lot of their value, median house price in Detroit fell from 100,000 to 13,000 as manufacturing left.

And then with mortgage defaults the mortgaged-backed securities lost value, there was a lot more going on though in the 2008/9 financial crisis, but part of it was the car assembly workers lost both their incomes and their capital value of their houses.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Was it inevitable? No. Look up a car factory in Germany and then Google Maps your way to it, it's doing great.

It's our policies.

So lets put in a bit of effort and assess the policies and the Presidents.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Two factors increase the cost of manufacturing in the US.

The crazy cost of health care. Fact is someone has to pay for it, and after the car companies couldn't pay for it and moved the factories out of the country, then the government was left with the bill and the National Debt went up. Yes there was also the cost of unionized labor, but healthcare costs were the big unavoidable factor.

Another factor is the way the US has decided to keep up employment and keep up pay rates by employing a vast army of bureaucrats in government offices. Someone has to pay for those, and spreading the cost just means everything becomes more expensive.

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Was it inevitable? No. Look up a car factory in Germany and then Google Maps your way to it, it's doing great.

It's our policies.

So lets put in a bit of effort and assess the policies and the Presidents.

Plenty of car factories in the US doing great as well - they're just not concentrated in Detroit anymore. About 1 million Americans are employed in auto and auto parts manufacturing as of 2019.

List of automotive assembly plants in the United States - Wikipedia

 

[MorkandMindy]

Who were the good Presidents with good policies and who were the bad ones, the numbers have long surprised me. This is the big picture:

 

[Handmaid for Jesus]

The problem may be policies, but I think the problem is greed.CEO's making millions and paying front line workers the minimum.Landlords are jacking up rents out of reach for the average worker.

 

[MorkandMindy]

The problem may be policies, but I think the problem is greed.CEO's making millions and paying front line workers the minimum.Landlords are jacking up rents out of reach for the average worker.

Very true. The greed is baked into the policies, the healthcare costs are all about greed. During the time when companies paid all medical costs via whatever policies they had, the customer paid nothing and the doctors just kept raising their prices, there was no price control.

And again the greed was that buying cheap things from China and selling them at about the same retail price, the big stores made huge profits. Overall the country suffered because the American workers no longer making things had to get unemployment pay and then work for low paid service sector or non productive government jobs, and meanwhile the country was bleeding out money.

 

[MorkandMindy]

And the huge profits meant big pay for the CEOs and their friends.

The money the Working Class was getting went partly to the country doing the manufacturing, and the increased profit goes to the CEOs.

So both the workers and the country suffer but the CEOs come out ahead.

That economic system is called 'neoliberalism'.

What we need to do is to build the economy into one consistent with good morality.

That translates into two words: Andrew Yang.