I love this whole “working together” facade that liberals are spewing out one side of their mouth (while spewing threats out the other).

Game on.

#9, Since your comment is off the topic of the post, I am passing on responding, except for this:

So how will the country deal with future entitlements? Like when the baby boomers start retiring over the next 5-10 years?

I do not know. Any attempts to discuss doing something structural have been ridiculed by the party that just gained congressional power. In 10 years we may be France and Germany, and at the point of no return, which is IMO what that party would prefer.

Sounds logical. What do you think?

So how will the country deal with future entitlements? Like when the baby boomers start retiring over the next 5-10 years?

I haven’t figured out how buying homes is a good investment when you have to pay 5-7X your yearly salary. Worse, buying multiple houses for investment flipping. Isn’t real estate something 40+% of the economy? Rising forclosure rates and ghost towns in Phoenix and Las Vegas don’t sound good.

Take a trip up I-75 and count cars in the parking lots of the factories. Many empty spaces? What’s happening on the old campus of Cincinnati Milacron in Oakley? Retail and service increases GDP, but what does it do to the balance of payments?

How’re we doing on energy self-sufficiency? Ethanol improves combustion, but calculations suggest that using corn as a feed stock requires as much exogenous energy input as you extract. (diesel and fertillizer) Nuclear may be the same. So, what IS our energy policy?

Gambling increases the GDP. Hedge fund activity increases GDP. Does any of this add value?

vis a vis WMT - my understanding is that they SOLD their operation in Germany July. They also sold their South Korean stores. My understanding is that Tesco in the UK is beating them badly. (BTW, Tesco is planning to open stores in US, so stay tuned.)

To reiterate: the economy has been wonderful for those of us who invest. I’m not so sure it’s been so wonderful for wage earners.

But you make the call.

There’s always room for improvement in just about anything, but to imply the economics have been not good over the past 5 years is simply a biased viewpoint with nothing to back it up. Sorry. Overall economic numbers of the past 5 years have been good and growing if not stellar in some areas.

#5, agree completely.

#4, having gone to Snopes, I didn’t realize that Target started using “Christmas” again in its holiday lit during the latter part of LY’s Christmas season. I didn’t get the same sense of “good relationship with the Salvation Army, though.

#3, I’ve never said there aren’t things to worry about, but I do believe that figuring out how to grow GDP consistently at 4% or more could solve some problems and buy time to solve others.

#2, WMT’s flat sales are US only. They did take a bloodbath in Germany that I think was recognized in 2nd P&L.

#1, WMT was flat and almost everyone else had a good month. Very odd. I don’t think Alan Greenspan was irresponsible during his last 9 years, as you imply. I’m not buying the corruption angle on Schmidt, because she frankly doesn’t need the money. And I stand by my stem cell outlook. ESCRs have gotten nowhere and show no signs of being trainable; ASCRs (technically non-embryonics) are increasingly being shown to be trainable. I have a Nov. 14 Postivity post scheduled about non-embryonics being touted as a cure for certain forms of blindness. The ASCR good news continues to come in, while ESCR is speculative at best, and hampered by fraud and overhype.

Roach has been a ‘permabear’, but he’s not wrong.

I came to your blog because I saw that our congressmen on the west coast who are involved in the Duke Cunningham ‘pay to play’ crookedness were supporting ‘mean jean’. I noticed that the Charlie Keating-type crims were financing her. I happen to know a bunch more about USEC than you do. It’s sad and ugly to watch your hometown team fail.

BTW, my business IS cell/molecular biology. Your views about ’stem’ cells may comport with church dogma, but they are ‘whacked’ when it comes to bio-science. There’s a reason that the Nobel Prizes come bi-coastal. There’s a reason that the winner of the Prize for discovering Prions (Mad Cow) disease did it at UCSF rather than his hometown of Cincinnati. There’s a reason that UC is suffering a braindrain and currently having trouble holding onto NIH grants.

But good luck to you. No matter what the Demmy’s do, it will be an economic improvement over the past 5 years. America will thrive even as the old heartland points fingers and sucks.

Ciao