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Page added on December 6, 2016
The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas
By all appearances, we’re in a golden age of innovation. Every month sees new advances in artificial intelligence, gene therapy, robotics and software apps. Research and development as a share of gross domestic product is near an all-time high. There are more scientists and engineers in the U.S. than ever before.
None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.
Economies grow by equipping an expanding workforce with more capital such as equipment, software and buildings, then combining capital and labor more creatively. This last element, called “total factor productivity,” captures the contribution of innovation. Its growth peaked in the 1950s at 3.4% a year as prior breakthroughs such as electricity, aviation and antibiotics reached their maximum impact. It has steadily slowed since and averaged a pathetic 0.5% for the current decade.
Outside of personal technology, improvements in everyday life have been incremental, not revolutionary. Houses, appliances and cars look much like they did a generation ago. Airplanes fly no faster than in the 1960s. None of the 20 most-prescribed drugs in the U.S. came to market in the past decade.
The innovation slump is a key reason the American standards of living have stagnated since 2000. Indeed, absent a turnaround, that stagnation is likely to continue, deepening the malaise that has left the middle class so dissatisfied.
More Americans than ever are pushing the frontiers of knowledge…
…And intellectual property is piling up…
…But productivity growth is slipping
Economists hotly debate the reasons, but there are several clear forces at play. The hurdles for transforming ideas into commercially successful products have grown. The low-hanging fruit in science, medicine and technology has been harvested and new advances are costlier, more complex and more prone to failure. Innovation comes through trial and error, but society has grown less tolerant of risk.
Regulations have raised the bar for commercializing new ideas while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product. Meanwhile, a trend toward industry concentration may have made it harder for upstart innovators to gain a toehold.
The innovation drought isn’t insoluble. Capital is plentiful, and some of the hype is valid: Old-line companies and upstart entrepreneurs alike are making high-risk bets on cars, space travel and drones, and some policy makers are trying to tolerate more risk so that these bets succeed.
More-optimistic economists note it can take years for breakthrough innovations to transform the economy. Some 40 years elapsed after the introduction of the electric lightbulb in 1879 before electricity had a measurable impact on national growth. It took some 20 years after the introduction of the personal computer in the 1970s for information technology to lift productivity.
“There has been a burst of innovations recently, especially in artificial intelligence, that we will see come to fruition in the next five to 15 years,” predicts Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can easily imagine that as these come to maturity and pervade the economy, the effects will be staggering.”
Still, apart from information technology, the hurdles to innovation are getting higher, not lower, and nowhere more acutely than in medicine.
In the past century, vaccines, antibiotics and clean water vanquished humanity’s biggest killers. Early researchers were aided by reliable theories for how to attack common diseases, which made it easy to figure out which compounds might yield a cure. Most of those diseases now have therapies.
“There is no longer either a commercial or scientific reason to search for any more anti-stomach-ulcer drugs,” says Jack Scannell of Oxford University’s Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation.
What’s left, he says, are diseases such as Alzheimer’s for which scientists lack a useful theory of treatment, leaving them with multiple dead ends so far. Mr. Scannell and several co-authors estimate the number of new drugs approved in the U.S. per dollar of research and development has fallen by half every nine years between 1950 and 2010. Approvals have risen since, though 40% are for “orphan” drugs which address diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people.
The declining payoff to medical research is starkly illustrated by a new study by Charles Jones of Stanford University and three co-authors. It found that in the decades before 1985, years of life saved through breast cancer treatment rose steadily each year, along with the volume of research. But since 1985, improvements in mortality slowed. They calculate that each new published trial added 16 years of life per 100,000 people in 1985, and that fell to less than one year by 2006. They found the same pattern across agriculture and semiconductors: steadily declining productivity per researcher.
Drugs are symptomatic of the rising value affluent societies place on human life. In 1960, 7% of U.S. R&D was devoted to health care. By 2007, it was 25%, according to another study by Stanford’s Mr. Jones. Thus, health research is displacing R&D that could have gone toward more mundane consumer products. Indeed, Mr. Jones predicts the rising value of human life virtually dictates slower growth in regular consumer goods and services—and they constitute the bulk of measured GDP.
Undoing the damage that past innovations—the burning of fossil fuels, for example—have done to the environment and human health is also gobbling up more innovative effort. This directly eats into the consumer’s pocketbook. The portion of a car’s price that pays to meet federal safety and fuel efficiency mandates has gone from zero in 1967 to 22% now, or $5,500 on a $25,000 car, according to Sean McAlinden, an economist at the Center for Automotive Research, an industry-supported think tank.
These have delivered genuine benefits: Highway fatalities fell from the late 1960s until recently, and the air is cleaner. Mr. McAlinden notes consumers may not have bought those features if given the choice.
A California mandate first introduced in 1990 now aims to make one in seven cars in the state emit zero emissions, which means powered by hydrogen or electricity. So while the purpose of the mandate, less pollution, is broadly shared, it achieves it by forcing car makers to favor certain technologies over others that may be commercially more viable.
Electric cars, for example, cost more and perform worse than equivalent gasoline cars; the batteries subtract space and add weight, and mileage is limited especially in extreme temperatures. Even with significant federal subsidies, sales have been hammered by low gasoline prices. Electric and hybrid vehicles together made up 1.9% of national sales so far this year, the lowest since 2006, according to Edmunds.com.
Electric cars don’t yet offer a “value proposition that resonates with the mainstream customer,” says John Viera, head of sustainability at Ford Motor Co. He contrasts that with EcoBoost, a Ford-developed gasoline injection technology that achieves the same power with fewer cylinders. “The beauty is you get the fuel economy improvement with no loss in performance,” he says. “It does add cost, but the customer is willing to pay for that technology unlike with the electrified vehicle.”
Innovation proceeds by trial and error, and errors sometimes kill people. Plane crashes, toxic waste spills and financial crises routinely lead to new regulations that make the world safer, but raise the bar for future innovation. The postcrisis imperative to prevent another has led to toughened financial regulation that has limited the supply of home-equity loans, credit cards and business loans that are often how new businesses finance themselves.
Joel Mokyr, a technology historian at Northwestern University, says innovation is “a messy process inevitably with some negative bite-back. But I have this sense we have become more risk-averse; we are less willing to accept the fact that things can go wrong.”
Hobbyists and the military have operated drones for years, but drones didn’t offer much commercial advantage over manned aircraft. Then, in the past decade the cost of one critical component, the gyroscope that keeps the vehicle level, plunged as the devices were developed for smartphones. Yet commercial drone operation was illegal, with some exemptions, because it required Federal Aviation Administration approval, which is designed for manned aircraft and requires a licensed pilot.
The FAA, at Congress’ request, introduced new rules last year that still restrict the operation of drones. They must generally stay within sight of the operator, below a certain altitude, to avoid collision with manned aircraft. Eli Dourado, a scholar at the Mercatus Institute, a free-market think tank, thinks that is overkill. Birds vastly outnumber drones. Yet in 25 years there have been just 12 fatal collisions between an aircraft and wildlife, and the only one involving a commercial airliner didn’t involve birds: it struck a pair of deer while landing.
The continued restrictions on commercial drones not only limit their use for consumer delivery by the likes of Amazon, but potentially lifesaving roles. U.S. railroads must regularly inspect their track, tunnels, bridges and signals, often in remote territory, usually from the ground, notes the Association of American Railroads. It is labor-intensive and sometimes dangerous. In remote regions, manned aircraft can’t fly low enough to spot problems. Drones would thus be ideal. The association notes such use is limited by the requirement that drones remain in the operator’s line of sight, stay below 500 feet, and not fly over people: “At a major derailment, for example, there potentially will be numerous railroad personnel on the scene.”
Despite these burdens, innovation is continuing, and in some fields, at an astonishing pace, nowhere more so than on the internet and on smartphones.
Amazon.com Inc. is almost single-handedly lifting productivity in retailing. J.P. Morgan notes the average internet retailer generates $1.3 million in sales per employee, compared with the average brick-and-mortar retailer’s $279,000. As Amazon’s market share has grown, that has lifted the entire industry’s productivity performance. Retail output per hour rose 3% in the past year, compared with 0.8% for business as a whole.
Yet there is a less encouraging side to this boom. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that productivity growth has accelerated at “frontier” companies, which use the most efficient processes and technology, while slowing at the remainder of firms. In other words, productivity is being held back by the inability of competitors to the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google to catch up.
The authors speculate this may be because new technologies are in fact amalgams of technologies and business processes that are difficult to replicate and often patent protected. Many digital companies are “platforms” that invest heavily in proprietary algorithms to more efficiently match customers to what they need, whether it is a Google search, an Uber car, or an eBay auction. Platforms in turn enjoy network effects: The more users join, the more useful they are to each user.
So long as the frontier firm continues to innovate, that doesn’t hold back productivity. The risk is that once a firm becomes dominant, no competitor can match its network and innovation is less necessary to retain customers.
“The market position came from some early innovative activity,” says Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale University and former federal antitrust official. “But it need not continue if my network effects are very strong. Everyone is on Facebook. What will cause us to leave Facebook? It would have to get dramatically worse.”
Faced with these barriers, what’s the solution? Mr. Jones of Stanford University says it takes more researchers today to produce an innovation of equivalent benefit than in the past. This means society will have to devote a bigger share of its people and resources to R&D just to maintain the same growth rate.
One way is to better exploit knowledge in other countries. Historically, poor countries caught up to rich ones by copying their ideas, as China has done so effectively. Now, the flow of ideas can run in the opposite direction as the volume of research in India and China explodes.
Regulators may have to become more tolerant of risk. Self-driving automobiles offer one bit of proof that they are.
Car manufacturers are eager to develop autonomous driving technology which, unlike alternative fuel technology, is being driven by market demand, not government mandate. Indeed, patents for autonomous driving technology took off rather suddenly in 2012 and already features such as automatic emergency braking and adaptive cruise control are standard on many models. Truly driverless cars are still years away, but that hasn’t stopped many companies from pouring billions into the pursuit of them.
Then last May, Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio resident, was killed when his Tesla hit a tractor trailer while operating under Tesla’s “autopilot” mode. The incident could have triggered a regulatory crackdown that brought deployment of the technology to a halt. Instead, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in September announced nonbinding guidance on how manufacturers should ensure their systems are as safe as possible.
“It’s very different from our usual model,” says Anthony Foxx, the Secretary of Transportation. Auto safety standards are typically quite prescriptive, he said. This time, “we’re leaving room for the industry to establish approaches to safety we may not have thought about.”
Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com
32 Comments on "The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas"
paulo1 on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 2:42 pm
Hmm self-driving cars. The problem is we ‘don’t need no more stinkin’ cars’, regardless how they are driven. We need clean air and water, good food, and meaningful employment; things we have lost along the way due to these mentioned ‘wonderful and past’ innovations.
Now, if only I could find a good mousetrap……
We didn’t get The Brave New World’ feelies, but we did get the smart phones that can access porn. We can even tweet like a POTUS. I guess that’s pretty close. Plus, we did get the police state and omnipresent state spying organizations.
Cheaper handguns might be nice over the next few years….just in case.
penury on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 2:44 pm
What can anyone say? The world is swamped with useless garbage which does not need to exist and currently no one has an idea of something “new”. Most of the things in the last few years are. NOT NECESSARY
onlooker on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 2:56 pm
Believubg Technotopia Innovation will take us to a better world is now like believing in Unicorns and Fairie dust. Another snake oil article
onlooker on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 2:56 pm
Believing
Apneaman on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 3:17 pm
Maybe it has something to do with having a society that has NO meaning other than fast profits and machine gun consumption? The cold war, even though fucking stupid as usual, was a great motivator and people truly believed. This global Neoliberal capitalist techno utopian has not worked out to fill most essential human needs and it is sucking the soul out of people and especially the young. It a disgusting toxic piece of shit in every way and those who control it and those who like it are already dead inside. Only the wilfully ignorant can’t see it or don’t care. Collapse will be a fucking mercy. Many can’t wait. Especially your kids.
Adolescent Suicide Spike Leaving Families in Agony
“Not only had the number of suicides among 10- to 14-year-olds reached an all-time high in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available; but the CDC also found that for the first time, more kids in that age range had died by suicide than by car accidents.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suicide-14-i-have-racked-my-brain-trying-understand-n686036
Teen depression on the rise in U.S.
Depression called ‘a sizeable and growing deadly threat’ to adolescents
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/depression-teens-1.3850011
One in five Canadian teens has seriously considered suicide, Kids Help Phone study finds
http://news.nationalpost.com/health/kids-help-phone-study-suggests-one-in-five-teens-has-considered-suicide-2
mx on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:09 pm
MONOPOLIES Stop Innovating, R&D becomes an Expense.
Monopolies are Rent Seeking, they want to milk out maximum profit for Minimum Effort, and that means lower jobs, and less ambitious management teams, that don’t need to be qualified in innovative fields.
Break up the monopolies and your problem is solved.
makati1 on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:10 pm
Like Penury said: There has be no NEW discovery in the last 50 years. Just tweaks to know ideas and discoveries
Didn’t bother to read after I realized that it was just another “feel good” unicorn dreaming bullshit.
If you want a good history overview of the last century, I suggest you watch this series:
“People’s Century” 26 parts by PBS/BBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYmbyOrM4gs&list=PLuL26fXZ8eTNLLnugg2BTyOZQ7HT-QZk4
In 24 hours of viewing, you can get a good idea of how everything connected and the causes and effects of major events. Likely NOT the history (propaganda) you were taught in school. You will also the obvious neglect to mention the central banksters part in much of it, but that is to be expected. It IS PBS/BBC after all.
.
mx on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:11 pm
“autonomous driving technology which, unlike alternative fuel technology, is being driven by market demand,” ???
Bull.
It’s being driven by Musk.
Everyone else who’s in it believes they need to compete with Musk.
Tesla still has the best system out there.
makati1 on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:13 pm
…You will also notice the obvious neglect to mention…
makati1 on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:14 pm
Tesla is a joke, MX. And Musk is a snake oil salesman. Nothing more. Nothing less.
onlooker on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:27 pm
central banksters yep, the core and epitome of greed. Orchestrating behind the scenes the general outline of the world we live in from about 1900 onward. Even have the blood of a US President on their greedy hands. The Power behind the throne
Ty on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:37 pm
Biomimicry is going to have a very large impact over the next 50 years.
makati1 on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:41 pm
Really Ty? And who is going to pay for your ‘transition’? The central bank printing presses are already smoking and about to explode. The peons are over their heads in debt. Government and corporations also. Dream on… LMAO
Hubert on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:51 pm
Never fails to amuse me just how stupid average MS journalists really are. You’re not running out ideas, you’re running on empty gas tank, you IDIOT!
onlooker on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 6:53 pm
Is that so TY, we are going to mimic Nature, when all we done is abuse, neglect and use her. let us just start by minimizing our wanton, callous and idiotic harm to Her. Then maybe we can arrogantly dare to imagine we can mimic the masterful harmony and precision of Nature.
Go Speed Racer on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 7:17 pm
Driverless cars are very important.
Instead of wasting time driving the car,
you will spend your time on a tablet PC
while the car drives for you. You will then have
more time for surfing porno, and looking for a job.
John Kintree on Tue, 6th Dec 2016 9:57 pm
Agreed that we need fewer cars. Most cars sit in garages and parking lots most of the time. If Americans are willing to share self driving cars instead of the one car per person way of life, then self driving cars could have a huge impact on our overall consumption of resources. The first word in the previous sentence was ‘if’ and that remains to be seen.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 1:41 am
More good news for Americans!
“A pensions time bomb spells disaster for the US economy”
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-pensions-time-bomb-spells-disaster-for-the-us-economy-2016-12
“Underfunded government pensions to the tune of $1.3 trillion, with a gap that just can’t be filled, is the ticking time bomb facing the US economy, which faces dramatic cuts in public services and potentially riots reminiscent of Athens six years ago.”
Do you have your $5,000 share to throw in the leeches retirement pot?
And dah beat goes on…
Cloggie on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:37 am
A pensions time bomb spells disaster for the US economy
The coming pensions time bomb will mostly be a disaster for the pensioners, not so much for the abstract ‘economy’.
http://tinyurl.com/cabs754
Amsterdam 1952
Few cars, no aviation, no television, no fridges, no divorces, no broken families, no haste, women are women, men are men, nobody is obese (meat once a week is the norm for many), no immigrants. Holland just recovered from the war and the economy is slowly picking up again. National debt is still at 160%, but rapidly declining. No state pensions for all yet (1957). Men on average die at 68. Six workdays a week (five from 1960 onward), for men that is, most women stay at home and have children, many of them four or more. Patriarchy was the norm. No video gadgets or home cinemas, just a chess board or a football or a library subscription. Children were almost always outside. A simple present you got only at your birthday or Sinterklaas and for the rest absolutely nothing.
Were those days a disaster? According to my parents, the fifties were the happiest days in their lives. The shit began during the late sixties, when the leftists began to rear their ugly heads, the parents began to lose control over their children and families began to break down.
My father retired at the age of 61, enjoyed the first few months of it but than began to cycle every day again to the Philips laboratory where he had worked a large part of his life, just to meet his old colleagues. Asian competition was not that stiff at the time. After some time my father was diplomatically told that his retirement now really had begun. He spend his remaining 26 years mostly in his chair. His retirement money was more than he could or was willing to spend as his children found out when it was over.
Peak Pension. We are already past that date. Progress in general is not guaranteed. First you had the magnificent Roman Empire, next the Middle Ages, the victory of the leftists of Antiquity aka Christians.
forbin on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:59 am
By all appearances, we’re in a golden age of innovation.
and
None of this has translated into meaningful advances in Americans’ standard of living.
and yet the article never questions or explores why this is so
forbin
Theedrich on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 4:35 am
The elephant in the room is always invisible. The West is importing a deluge of ThirdWorlders to compensate for its own decline in population and to do the dirty work that its citizens did not want to do. There is no concern about the consequences of this genosuicide; indeed the MSM promote it, salivating over the extinction of Whitey and imagining an infinite future of techno-orgasms, as exemplified by the above article.
Whenever the topic turns to population reduction, it is always steered into the question of getting Whites — but not, say, Sand Negroes — to stop breeding. Indeed, the oligarchic stringpullers constantly bray about how much money they are investing in Africa to help the evolutionarily most retarded race there so that it can expand all the more and invade us, thereby terminating 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution.
The U.S. decided long ago to combat the will of nature. It preferred Christianity, Marxism, unbridled materialism and anything else to Darwin’s principles and the restraints demanded by the biosphere. So now it is nature, not man, that will take care of the problem.
Anonymous on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 4:35 am
Even if you accept the premise of this wall st urinal piece, that all those innovations are taking place on a ‘monthly basis’ (dubious at best), there is another problem with the writers ‘logic’.
Pretty much every one of these supposedly light-speed innovating fields, has one primary purpose. To ELIMINATE jobs, not create them. The writer of course, notes that these ‘fields’ are not doing much for employment in the empire. No shit? Hardly a earth shaking observation. Whats funny, is the WSU doesnt seem to see the connection between fields of research whose primary application has been to REDUCE employment, and the fact they aren’t really creating all that much in way of new jobs.
Too funny.
brough on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 6:04 am
‘We’re out of big ideas’!!
No we’re not.
It just that our economists, politicians and other members of the establishment who subscribers to WSJ perception of technology and what it does for them and society as a whole. Technology shapes society. Society does not shape technology. The problem with todays society is that it has become dependent on discoveries and inventions made over a century ago. Technology that has become so become so highly developed and engrained into human psyche that we have reached its intellectual and physical limits. To the point where collapse is the only alternative, for new ideas to come to the fore and to shape new social paradigms.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 6:46 am
brough, new ideas like the flint axe and tribalism? That is the only “tech’ we will have when the SHTF. If you haven’t noticed, everyone is deep in debt slavery. Those who are not soon will be when their paper wealth goes poof. The age of ‘new’ anything is over.
anonymouse on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 11:10 am
“We’re Out of Big Ideas”
Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha (breath) hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhaha
Out of big ideas that person is aware of. This has been a huge year for big ideas!
NASA’s EMDrive confirmation opens up access to all the water and metals in the Ort Cloud. Completely changes our options for the exploration of space for future generations.
And if any of you think Cold Fusion research has slowed down, you’re sorely mistaken. This is when things get interesting.
As much as I like doom scenarios, unfortunately this is truly an incredible time like 1903 or 1783. 1819, 1873, not so much.
banjo on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 1:54 pm
Ahhh the zero emission “electric” car.
Apneaman on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 1:57 pm
Remember when the econ 101 priesthood said more people equals more brainpower to come up with more clever ideas? Hasn’t panned out has it? They must have forgotten that part about how it wasn’t the magical free market that paid for all that R&D, but rather the taxpayers from when there was a huge middle class and corporation were not people. The secular faith has not worked out too well and it’s taking the humans to hell in a hurry.
The new astrology
By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience
“The cutbacks aren’t restricted to the humanities: in 2011, the state of Texas announced it would eliminate nearly half of its public undergraduate physics programmes. Even when there’s no downsizing, faculty salaries have been frozen and departmental budgets have shrunk.
But despite the funding crunch, it’s a bull market for academic economists. According to a 2015 sociological study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the median salary of economics teachers in 2012 increased to $103,000 – nearly $30,000 more than sociologists. For the top 10 per cent of economists, that figure jumps to $160,000, higher than the next most lucrative academic discipline – engineering.”
“Unlike engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects – cell phones, plastic – to justify the high valuation of their discipline. Nor, in the case of financial economics and macroeconomics, can they point to the predictive power of their theories. Hedge funds employ cutting-edge economists who command princely fees, but routinely underperform index funds. Eight years ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year, $1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge funds would lose to the S&P 500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In 1998, a fund that boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly causing a global financial crisis.
The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. ”
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
And yet so many still hang on their every word. It kinda reminds me of Mayan Priests who, as things got worse, just kept sacrificing more people to no avial. Our econo-priests don’t cut hearts out, they sacrifice the people via policy and no matter how bad it gets they stick to the scripture. Humans and their religions.
Boat on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 2:25 pm
Meanwhile back at the ranch the US stock market is up 250 points to over 19500 at this moment. Just for the hell of it I think I will take the rest of Dec. off. Buy me an electric pepper mill and fire up the grill.
Apneaman on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:01 pm
Meanwhile back at reality ranch how’s the stock buybacks coming along boat?
Boat everything back to normal in Houston from the two record breaking AGW jacked multi billion dollar rain bombs? I guess the dead can’t get back to normal, but maybe you can grill a steak for them? Ooooh you just missed a big American BarBecue in Tennessee the other day. The whole town had a AGW jacked bonfire and cooked 14 American consumers (formerly citizens). Not sure if they sprinkled any pepper corn on them.
Texas floods: 9 soldiers killed in Fort Hood accident
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/us/texas-floods/
Yabut Boat has cheap gas and cheap steaks and his fake stocks are climbing so who fucking cares about dead soldiers in yet another AGW jacked rain bomb.
Boat is happy.
joe parks on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 3:33 pm
I don’t know why this is so hard to understand. We are a consumer driven economy, meaning the consumer needs as much money as possible to afford that consumption thereby driving the economy, making owners more money, and themselves in the end. You all continue to support this supply side ideal, corporations don’t create jobs they just provide them. The consumer creates the jobs through spending. One more point, taxes, we need to switch to a tiered system for business tax based on the number of Americans employed in this country. That way the mom and pop shops/loyal corporations could see a sweet 15% because most of their employees would be here, whereas the stingy companies leaving for wages (not taxes and regulation) could see a deserving 75% or something along those lines. There are simple solutions to everything one just needs to get away from the partisan B.S.
makati1 on Wed, 7th Dec 2016 5:45 pm
joe, the “we need to” will never happen. The system is going to build until it explodes and the whole clusterf–k ends, forever. At best we might pick up the pieces of the economy at an 1800s level while trying to survive the climate changes. At worst, we will be nomad tribes trying to survive the changing climate. Do you see the real challenge? Hint: It’s not the economy…
Anonymous on Thu, 8th Dec 2016 1:36 am
I got a big idea, how about trying, in a serious way, to fix the consequences of all the previous ‘big ideas’. That a big enough idea, or too big? Im guess most would think thats a bad idea, or idea no one is really ready for. Yea, better to keeping trying to find the next ‘big’ idea instead. Driverless cars are big idea, but also one that doesnt work, so its kind DOA. Space travel? Big idea, and and expensive one, with no real hope of any real return on investment. Big nuclear?..maybe not. Fusion anyone? AI? All that’s given us is automated phone help lines and some computers that play a mean game of chess. Seems a lot of the big ideas aren’t are nowhere fast.
Hell, im still waiting for my robot maid, flying cars, and vacations on the moon they promised me back in the 70s.