>>Not quite the same now.There's no obvious replacement powers. Everyone keeps saying China but they should take a look at comparative military spending first. The Chinese have little in the way of deep water navy or advanced aircraft. They have a long way to go before they can rival the USA.
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>Military spending may not cut it, actually it may come as a hindrance. Just like we said that Cupid must be Soviet, because he's armed but without pants, this wasteful spending may actually be one of the nails in the coffin of greatness.
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>But I guess this had to be, there were graffiti. The political establishment was long ago under the rule of the highest bidder, so laws were made which rewarded exporting production abroad. It's the gravity of money - not just that it went where the workforce is far cheaper, but achieved a tax break for it. Which depleted the resources at home - all those unemployed production workers still had to eat, so they went for whatever jobs were available - the lower paid, or the completely unproductive jobs. Just look at how many levels of middlemen exist, or how many services are called "products", where nothing is actually made. As someone said in the last century, "now we'll wash each other's pants, and call that economy?".
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>Yes, the profits were coming, but didn't trickle down. And the productivity figures were getting higher partly due to technology, but partly due to creative accounting, which counted all those overpriced "products" as real production, and also counted some of the displaced production by virtue of having company HQ on US soil... but the jobs were long gone.
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>And we let the corporations do this on our watch.

In the UK the royal,wedding is about to happen.The brides family are in commerce. They make party gift bags http://www.partypieces.co.uk
Thats the UK . We used to make steel now we make crap.