Rosaria posted:
Groucho48 posted:
I recall you contrasted the Obama response to the housing disaster unfavorably to China's building lots of dormitories for people. There's other stuff but it was a while ago and I don't really keep track. But, generally, during the time of the stimulus and after, you consistently compared what China was doing to what the U.S. was doing and preferred what China was doing. Even though what China was doing...trying to bootstrap hundreds of millions of rural workers up from abject poverty to plain old poverty was completely different from what the U.S. was trying to do...keep 10's of millions from falling from a comfortable life down to poverty.
China was not only building dormitories, China was building entire cities to not only boost their housing market which was falling but also to provide homes for people who lost theirs. These were not only for the poor, this was for everyone who lost their homes. They connected these cities by train to large central cities where employment was supported by the government instead of extensions of unemployment benefits and welfare programs. They got new cities, we got tent cities. They did everything they could to ensure that the skill-sets of their workers were not allowed to wither on the vine. The Chinese government began to foster partnerships with businesses and universities that allowed for these skill-sets to not only remain valuable but to also grow and change to meet the demand of new technologies. China, much like Germany, invested in private businesses to expand their work force and keep them employed rather than hand out checks. Tech corporations like Intel and Apple to name just two built new R&D facilities in partnership with universities which guaranteed jobs for the students at the end of their school career. Germany took their stimulus money and literally gave employers the money they needed to keep people employed for the very same reason China did: allowing worker skill-sets to diminish is tantamount to allowing the base of the economy to deteriorate. Which approach to do you think worked out best in the long term?
So, I post "However, there is a long history of right wingers here on the Outpost, using China as a positive example of how to handle lower and middle class folks, compared to the U.S."
You post "Really? Name one suggestion I've ever posted re China's handling of lower class folks and its application to the US. "
I post "I recall you contrasted the Obama response to the housing disaster unfavorably to China's building lots of dormitories for people."
and you post that above stuff. Kind of proves my point. You prefer a Chinese style totalitarian response to problems. I agree that a lot of what they did made sense and should have been done in the U.S., but, the right has so demonized any concept of government policy or intervention into the magical free market, that, there is no way the U.S. could ever come up with the kind of government/business partnership we'll need to flourish in the 21st century. Or that could have done any of that stuff you mention.
Not to mention that, while authoritarian regimes seem fine and dandy when they are doing stuff you agree with, or, when their vision is a successful one, authoritarian regimes, by their very nature, are much more rigid, less open to out of the box thinking, are much more open to graft and fraud...I'll bet you there are examples of fraud in China that would make Solyndra look like penny ante stuff...treat their people not as citizens but as enemies to be controlled and whom are incapable of making decisions about their own lives.
Not to mention that, it turns out, a lot of those cities they built are ghost towns, full of shoddy construction and are raw wounds on the landscape. And let's not even get into pollution and such.
The U.S. could have done a much better job of dealing with the economic collapse. Some of the things China did and is doing are very good, for China, and many of them would be good, here, as well. But, overall, anyone who prefers the Chinese model of government to the U.S. model is looking through blinders.
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“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.†– Richard Feynman
ou guys need to stop dick riding wow and compare everything to it. It never invented a godamn thing, just made it popular. " -tinkly
