Quote :

"- just because actual employment numbers in manufacturing goes down, that does not mean that goods produced goes down, especially not in this age of automation in the manufacturing industry."

this

5/11/2010 10:47:32 PM

This isn't an economic argument about whether or not productivity cannot increase while employment decreases.

It is about the growing influence of a sector of the population that is responsible for producing no goods or services, but which gains its revenue by threat of force as well as (by virtue of my last link) the growth in entitlement spending which is indexed to inflation and thus stuck with us no matter how hard we try to inflate ourselves out of debt (should we go that route).

5/12/2010 12:10:15 AM

How can you say the gov. isn't involved in producing goods or services?

That's a completely senseless statement.

Obviously there are plenty of gov. employees that are purely cogs of a bureaucracy, but a fairly significant chunk of the gov. machinery is gear towards keeping the production of goods and services safe and fair. The US wouldn't have become great without it.

5/12/2010 12:17:39 AM

Quote :

"It is about the growing influence of a sector of the population that is responsible for producing no goods or services"

But their size hasn't grown proportionally, it almost exactly matches population growth.

5/12/2010 1:25:07 AM