CHINESE BUY ROCKY MOUNTAIN AIR

Can China really hold out until 2030 to start to attack its pollution problems?

A Canadian start-up company [Vanity Air] bottling fresh air from the Rocky Mountains has seen sales to China soar because of rising pollution levels.*
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“Our first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” co-founder Moses Lam says in a telephone interview with the Telegraph. 

A crate containing 4,000 more bottles is making its way to China, but he says most of that shipment  has been bought.
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A 7.7 Litre can of crisp air taken from Banff National Park in the majestic Rocky Mountains range sells for roughly 100 yuan (£10), which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China. 

Vitality Air sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to India and the Middle East. But China remains its biggest overseas market.

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12051354/Chinese-buy-up-bottles-of-fresh-air-from-Canada.html

PLIGHT OF AMERICAN WORKERS

In capitalism it seems like a large group of people need to be relatively poor because a lot of low-cost labor is needed in most industries. Why do you think that a certain party voted in congress to increase the child tax credit to $1,000 where you deduct this $1,000 from your income taxes in addition to getting a $600 deduction on your income? Does one think that wealthy people will have a child for a crummy $1,000 decrease in their taxes? No, it is to try to get workers to provide more low-cost workers.

We seem to be in a trend here in the U.S. where the wages of American workers are decreasing to find some sort of parity with workers in low-pay foreign countries like China. Factored in is the price of natural gas in the foreign countries, shipping expenses, and no doubt a number of other items. Yes, jobs are being brought back to the U.S. but at lower wages than before the job was off-shored (jobs restored since they were lost in 2008 pay about 23% less*).  Note added in December of 2014: the wages of the American worker also must be less than the cost of automation so the American worker has a double bind.  The Golden Age of the American worker may be over.

Amazingly, American auto workers will even vote against their personal interests and refused to unionize at the VW Chattanooga auto plant (712 against to 626 for unionization) even though there was no opposition from VW management.  As a result, workers at this plant are lower paid than at other VW plants:
In Germany, for instance, auto workers at VW plants get paid an average of $67.14 an hour. That's more than double the average hourly rate for an established unionized worker in Detroit, and it's more than three times what the non unionized workers in Chattanooga can hope to earn. According to a company spokesperson, new hires at Chattanooga start at $14.50 an hour, a rate that gradually increases to $19.50 an hour after three years on the job. (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/19/vw-uaw-tennessee-auto-workers-stupid-or-coerced)

* http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/11/us-usa-mayors-jobs-idUSKBN0GB1T920140811

MOST IMPRESSIVE PRESIDENT - RIGHT OR WRONG

Here I will cover only the post WW-II period.  Of course, Lyndon Johnson was impressive because he had to get the votes from the opposing party, Republicans, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  At that time the South was the Solid South of the Democratic Party and they voted against the Acts.  Perhaps Johnson got some help because it was in the aftermath of the shocking assassination of Present Kennedy, but it was still impressive.  He also initiated the Wilderness Preservation Act of 1964.  Surprisingly he had positive cash flow in the last year of his term.  Of course, Johnson ruined his presidency by massively escalating the war in Vietnam, but that should not detract from the huge importance of the two Acts.

Richard Nixon was impressive for his landmark trip to China that led to resuming diplomatic relations,  finally disengaging our troops in Vietnam in January of 1973, forming the EPA in 1970, and getting the Clean Air Act passed in 1970.  Also it took someone like Nixon to continue that Apollo Program after the near disaster of Apollo 13 on its trip to the moon.  Nixon does not get much credit for these things because it is felt that he only did them to distract the American public from the Vietnam War.  Liberal commentator Mark Shields has called Nixon that last liberal president.  Of course Nixon is the only president to resign the presidency as a result of the so-called Watergate coverup.

Jimmy Carter was impressive for finally settling the Panama Canal issue, forming the Department of Energy, starting the deregulation of the airline (1978) and trucking industries (1980), and the massive Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 that led to more than 107 million acres being being under the protection of wilderness laws.  He lowered the annual Federal deficit to near zero, but never has a positive cash flow.  The amazing thing is that all this was done in one term as President.  The conservative nature of Carter was unpopular among members of his own party (Democrats)  Unfortunately his presidency was ruined by the Iranian hostage crisis that wasn't settled until after the presidential election and assumption of Ronald Reagan to the presidency.

I conclude the most impressive president was George W. Bush - for better or worse.  Though he ignored warnings of an attack by a group known as Al Qaeda, when it occurred on September 11, 2001, he initiated the Afghanistan War in October of 2001, to eliminate Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and to dismantle the Taliban.  I felt we had to do something for better or worse although I didn't know that the war was going to last more than a dozen years.  Though Bush's economic policies drove the U.S. into a deep recession, to his credit when he realized what had happened, he did force passage of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) to curb the fiscal crisis.  Perhpas Bush's greatest accomplishment was to get Medicare D, a prescription drug program against his own party's  wishes (Republicans).  Likewise he managed to get the Clear Skies Act of 2003 against considerable opposition.

The amazing thing was the repeated ability of Bush's team to bully the opposing party as well as members of his own party's congressional members into voting for things they didn't believe in.  In addition to what has been mentioned above, there are the huge tax cuts for the wealthy (The biggest part of the Federal deficit today.),* and to go to war with Iraq under false pretenses, a country that was no threat to the U.S. but has a lot of oil.  I stand in awe of these accomplishments, some good and some bad.

But Bush's influence had limits.  He unfortunately failed to get approval from congress on a trade pact with Vietnam, failed to get immigration reform done,  and fortunately he failed to begin converting Social Security into an investment program from an entitlement,

* Figure from: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/news/2011/06/07/9785/the-bush-tax-cuts-are-the-disaster-that-keeps-on-giving/
Also see article by conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/are-the-bush-tax-cuts-the-root-of-our-fiscal-problem/

TOO MANY AMERICANS?

A number of years ago, I read an article that said that countries like India and China could probably have economies that would provide 200 million people each with a decent living.  I don't recall what was behind this.  Though a total of 400 million people is an impressive number, it is a small fraction of the population of these two countries.  Well, now America has a population of 314 million and counting.  Have we arrived at a state where a large part of the population will continuously be a poor underclass?

Of course, America has had its poor all along its history.  Among other things, capitalism all but demands a stratified society.  You cannot have all employees of a company have salaries of a million dollars a year, for example.  If you did, products would be prohibitively expensive.  But does there come a point where the population has grown to a point where it exceeds the ability of the private corporative system to employ the bulk of the adult working force?

We may have arrived at this point in that corporate America is doing very well by way of profits, but the employed work force is growing slower than the work force supply.  After all, it is not the job of corporate America to grow jobs; it is the job of corporate America to make increasing profits.  Jobs are incidental to the system.  In fact, corporate America will do everything to minimize the the cost of the work force needed by them through things like automation or "off shoring" jobs to places with a cheaper work force.

At the same time, the government budgets are declining although we have been consuming our "seed corn" through inattention to our infrastructure that is slowly decaying.  To devote, say, $50 billion/yr to improving our infrastructure would not be excessive, but might employ as many as a million employees; yet the politics of our time opposes infrastructure programs though they are not useless endeavors such as having one shift dig holes and the next shift fill them in.  The country gets something valuable for their efforts in a more efficient and convenient nation, and even in an improved national defense.