[pessimizer]

There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.

It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.

And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.

[_DeadFred_]

How do you square that China is way more in the red than the USA and things like their high speed rail aren't able to pay down the construction loans, let alone cover the coming maintenance?

China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.

The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.

The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.