It’s like borrowing $80,000 to buy a $40,000 car
and maxing out your credit cards to buy some fancy new clothes
and showing it off to your relatives to convince them “I’m rich and successful.”
It’s like borrowing $1.00
to by 50 cents worth of stuff one year
and declaring yourself a success because you did it a whole lot of times.
The economy is not healthy.
The GDP (considered all by itself) is just an economic indicator.
It is not a synonym for economic health.
So, to make things better, let’s shut down the Government. That will certainly put things back in order. 
It does not usually happen this way.
Usually our deficit is a problem, but usually annual GDP growth > the annual deficit. That is not the case right now and has not been (except for a brief time) since the start of the pandemic
To re-use my old analogy:
One farmer feeds his family because his fields are healthy, they produce enough corn to feed his family, plus a small surplus.
The other farmer, well, his field are sick and aren’t producing much.
His family feeds itself from a AID truck.
It is nonsensical to look at the second farmer and declare “His family is eating a lot of food. His economy s healthy.”
In the Reagan era, what economist call
“the marginal revenue product of government debt” was over 3.00.
That means every time the government borrowed and spent a dollar the economy grew, by one count, more than $3.00. (At least in the short term.)
Today, “the marginal revenue product of government debt” is under 1.00.
That means every time the gov’t borrows a dollar and spends it the economy shrinks.
Why such a nonsensical answer @peek-a-boo ?
We could shut down the government, but I don’t think that would work.
We could kill kittens and paint all the cars pink, but that wouldn’t work either.
What would work comes in two parts
I was being sarcastic with my nonsensical answer. 
More than a few GOP would love nothing better than to shut it all down. I’m not one of them.
Using your analogies, number 2 is like trying to get an out-of-control person to stop spending so much and be more fiscally responsible. That person has maxed out all of their credit cards, yet still can’t stop spending.
The answer seems obvious on paper but in reality…
I don’t mind the GOP threatening/using the shutdown tactic every few years,
but recently the GOP has threatened it and caved, and threatened it and caved so many times it has become a useless tactic (other than making the GOP look like a clown show.)
What’s the definition of insanity?
.
.
.
Still, that is off topic.
The current “economic expansion” is an illusion, and stupid GOP tactics are as related to that topic as “the GOP wears the wrong color shoes.”
What impact would a long strike by the ILA have? It’s just a few days away.
My undertanding is that, it would be pretty severe although there is quite a bit of sensationalizing and partial-facts being floated the media.
Kind of like excited coverage of a hurricane, then a jogger casually jogs by and a couple of kids are seen playing in puddles in the background. (The storm is real. the damage is real, nonetheless the media sensatioalizes.)
Hard for me to put that into numbers
What part of the products lining the shelves of our stores are imported from overseas and shipped here by sea? The same question applies to the supply chain for our assembly plants here. Our plants here don’t really fabricate any of the parts they use to assemble the products coming out of the plant. How many of those parts are shipped here by sea from overseas. A longshoreman strike will bottleneck the supply chain for products and parts, with little to no domestic manufacturing base to fill the gap this side of the ports in the supply chain.
There is no way forward without bipartisan compromise. With today’s toxic political atmosphere, that will never happen.
So here we are.
My fear with the GOP government shutdown threat is that they might actually succeed. For those of us retirees depending on our 401k savings, a long-sustained shutdown would be devastating, and it would achieve nothing but political theater.
I am a fiscal conservative, but I’m also a pragmatic realist. There is no quick easy fix and threatening to shut down the government every chance they get just drives me further away from the Republican party I used to embrace.
They want to shut down the entire east coast, and all the way to Texas. I believe that’s almost 50% of our imports. What I worry about, and this is only if a strike drags out, are prices spiking due to a shortage of supply.
Well the ports affected are only those on the East Coast and the Gulf.
Even those ports wouldn’t be completely shut down but parts of them would be.
Oil for example would nto be affected.
That said a strike like this would be disruptive, largely because of the fear factor and the resulting bidding wars for imported products.
George W Bush shut down a simlar strike in 2002 after 11 days.
Much like the discussion of GOP Congressioanl tactics I am not sure why this is being discussed on this thread but oh well.
I don’t know how you shut down a strike, but I only brought it up because I think it would have an impact on the economy beyond what you originally talked about. But I do realize it is slightly off topic. I’ll stop.
From CNN
The NRF is one of more than 200 business groups that sent a letter to the White House this week asking that the Biden administration act to prevent a strike, saying that the country relies on moving both imports and exports through these ports.
“The last thing the supply chain, companies and employees…need is a strike or other disruptions because of an ongoing labor negotiation,” said the letter.
The letter does not explicitly spell out the action sought, but it implies President Joe Biden should exercise powers under what is known as the Taft-Hartley Act to order a quick end to the strike, as President George W. Bush did when he halted an 11-day lockout of union members at West Coast ports in 2002.
Some economists think Biden will decide to take that action, despite strong union opposition to such a move.
Imports (including energy) are 15% if the US economy.
Shutting down a portion of non military imports at a portion of harbors is easy to overstate/sensationalize. (like Hurricane coverage)
But the impact would be significant, and the panic and panic bidding would be real.
You’re referring to the Taft Hartley act. An 80 day cooling off period. That’s going to have zero impact. It has no teeth in this situation. The union leader already addressed this. He said production would basically stop. It would go to a crawl for the 3 months. So if our brain dead President enacted this, it would be a 3 month extension of the strike. Which is why they said they weren’t getting involved.
Christmas shopping starts well before black Friday these days.
Hmmm . . .
Nah, we’re good.
I don’t think the original topic was garnering much discussion anyway.
Christmas shopping… Harris/Bidenomics makes Christmas shopping double plus good!
The whole video is good. But you can skip to 15:20 to see the end game. It’s also where he addresses the Taft-Hartley act.
