printReports the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama’s team is putting together a new economic stimulus plan containing more than $500 billion in federal spending and tax cuts over the next two years, Obama aides and advisers said Sunday. That package would be far more aggressive than anything envisioned during the campaign.
My admonition against the last such lewd display obtains:
“ To revive flaccid financial markets, American politicians are now groping obscenely for their ‘stimulus packages.’ It’s an ugly image. It’s also worse than useless. They might as well be gesturing lewdly like crotch-grabbing rappers, because that’s as likely as their economic package is to get the country out of economic straits. …”
The China that I visited was indeed modernizing but they had massive inefficiencies and underemployment that I saw 10 years ago – as well as massive pollution. The authoritarian, paranoid nature of politics there does not allow for uninhibited self-criticism which is needed for sustainment of growth. [This assertion is an unsubstantiated one and a leap.–IM] and a Like Japan, I expect China to top off. They also depend on a flow of money and customers from the West – and hence are dependent on our Bernanke-Zimbabwe-Weimar Federal Reserve dollars. So the Chinese picture is not as rosy as they or others might make it – but certainly better now than under Mao’s socialism.
I went to China 10 years ago and while it was developing/growing/modernizing big time, it also had massive pollution, inefficiencies, and underemployment. It also has authoritarianism and corruption which will serve to limit its growth in the long haul as its paranoid political system will not allow uninhibited self-corrections. Like Japan, its growth curve will probably tip over shortly. Also, China is tied to exporting to the “economic stimulating” (counterfeit currency) Weimar-Zimbabwe-Bernanke funny money economies of the West. Lastly, the one-child policy is also likely to lead to some generational as well as sexual imbalances which may also have political and economic ramifications. Regardless, it is certainly true that Fascist Authoritarian China is a great improvement over Maoist Totalitarian China.