Elizabeth Warren famously wants us to be more like China and devote even greater percentages of our GDP to infrastructure construction.
Warren is making this push despite the fact that we already spend huge sums on infrastructure, we just don’t do it very efficiently as state and local governments have proven to be very bad at managing infrastructure costs.
Part of the problem is that federal projects and many state projects require union labor or equivalent pay scales which costs a fortune (the Boston Big Dig was a prime example) so we get a lot less for more.
The more important problem is that Warren is completely clueless about China. I previously pointed out that Warren seemed unaware of the Chinese real estate and construction bubbles resulting from use of infrastructure construction to stimulate the economy.
There’s even more evidence that the Chinese infrastructure bubble is bursting, reflected in a collapse of commodity prices, as pointed out by Walter Russell Mead (via Instapundit):
The latest sign that China’s economy is slowing dramatically? A plunge in the price of steel and iron ore. The Financial Times has the numbers:
Hot rolled steel, an industry benchmark, traded at Rmb3,562 ($560) a tonne this week, having tumbled 19 per cent since April to its lowest level in almost three years.
The collapse in steel prices is already roiling the industry:
Last month the China Iron and Steel Association said domestic steelmakers saw profits plunge 96 per cent in the first half compared with a year ago, turning the industry into a “disaster zone”. . .
According to Reuters, Chinese steel mills have either defaulted on supply contracts or deferred shipment of up to 4m tonnes of iron ore this month following the fall in prices.
Meanwhile, investors are taking money out of the country, exports have hit a six-month low and growth forecasts are down considerably.
Is it too much to ask that Warren at least do a Google search before she comes up with an economic plan for the country?
Apparently so, because expecting a female Senate candidate to use Google must be anti-woman, or something like that.
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Warren is perfectly in line with most of the liberal arts/sciences academia that I’ve come across. They start with a biased premise (this will be best for social justice/engineering), they look for applications as examples, and they cherry-pick the results with total disregard for total impact and consequences. After all, the progressives still fight for simply expanding programs and increasing expenditures for anything targeted towards poverty. Their “evidence” is to find and isolate the few who have benefited, ignoring the costs, or costs per benefit. I’ve more than once been involved in a discussion with an academic in the past decade who has essentially told me that the solution is to expand and increase, while “tweaking” programs to reduce the negatives. Fraud is just fine as long as there is an effort to identify it and address it, even if the reduction is small.
The solution is always MORE, MORE, MORE. We just need to do it better, with more money. To Warren, the Chinese experience is most likely seen as a ‘minor setback’ that can be engineered out and avoided through brilliant planning by the academic class (sarcasm again).
Did you know that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great grandmother was 1/64th Chinese?
I think it’s higher
1/64th Tibetan then?
Heh… What does competency have to do with running for political office? We’ve already elected a community organizer to head the world’s most powerful nation and it’s been a agonizing rapid slide downhill.
Warren is indeed clueless and yet that community organizer has copied her, “You didn’t build this,” rhetoric which incidently she stole from some obscure professor on the west coast.
The real question is whether the electorate will make the right decision(s) in November?
I sure hope so as this may well be our last chance to get it right…
Here’s a Diane Sawyer/Chris Cuomo/ABC “shocking” “hard-hitting” piece on U.S. bridges and road projects being doled out to China and Chinese workers. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/us-bridges-roads-built-chinese-firms-14594513?tab=9482930?ion=1206853&playlist=14594944 The liberal dolts at ABC didn’t even appreciate the irony in including outraged comments from the union buddies of Obama/Democrats who would have ABC’s dumb watchers think that inflated union bids weren’t to blame for the loss of contracts.
Elizabeth Warren is counting on MA constituents not understanding the basics of Economics–a topic in which she and Obama claim to have (academic) expertise. I think the electorate (in MA and elsewhere) has figured out that the Emperors are pretty naked.
It’s my bet that the people of MA have grown tired of the academic class telling everyone else they are smarter, and therefore know better. In the last decade, there has been a big shift away from skilled labor and “working class” jobs. There has been more growth in professional technical jobs, especially in software and health sciences, although not exclusively. Right or wrong depending on your view of the future of the US economy, there are many who have been struggling and angry as the classical industrial jobs go away and “high-tech” replaces them. To make it worse, the high-tech sector gets nearly all of the ‘time at the teat’ in federal and state monies.
Brown looks like one of them. Warren looks like the problem, and many will not buy her ‘help the little guy’ rhetoric. She looks like every other state politician in the past decade who has played a role in the demise of jobs, as they see it. They won’t study economics, they will be attracted to who seems like the better and more sincere champion.
Liberal social engineers could never cut it as civil engineers. Too much math.
Social engineers rely on feelings. Numbers are simply a way to support their feelings, never used to disprove them. Warren is all about feelings, cost be damned. Brown is all about getting the best results within your budget. My opinion is that many of the MA voters are beginning to see how stark those differences are.
Michigan is ahead of the curve when it comes to predicting the outcome of liberal progressive economic destruction.
When Detroitification comes to your town.
Once the small businesses are leveled by their tax and spend policies, when jobs and communities are destroyed, liberals want to leverage and influx of foreign investment with special land deals, tax abatement’s, incentives and grants, create special tax carve outs for small businesses compliant with the liberal agenda to divide and buy votes.
ie People are hurting for jobs so lets create a US Tax Free Renaissance Zone .. China Demands Them !
Crony Chronicles: I Want To Be A Crony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aO9tA5DWJM
Its not just the prevailing wages that drive up the costs of these projects. It’s frustrating that most people don’t understand the amount of redtape and added stipulations that get added on to projects that are Federally Funded.
Command economies CANNOT work for long.
We know this from countless models over history.
What does it tell us about people like Warren that they insist on repeating a failed experiment…with our money…that has brought misery and poverty?
Very good point, and one I have been making for a while now. As long as so many of the major investment decisions in China are made by the central government, they can’t prosper over the long term. All those wasted resources catch up with you after a while.
Yeah, I keep reading the prognosticators who say that China will be the world-beater in the future, and saying, “Wha…???
They MAY be that, but it won’t be under this model.
But I wasn’t afraid of Japan, a few decades back, either.
All those dragons seem to have a short life-span.
Since Warren hasn’t a clue how to develop an economic plan for a specified region – local, state, national – she has no choice but to look around and find an existing one that (1) she believes works, and (2) would support her liberal agenda. How teliing she finds her model in communist China, and further, as the Prof points out, it is no good model at all.
No kidding here: aside from being a pathological liar, and a bit of a sociopath, Elizabeth Warren is a head-case — she’s nuts.
She’s in the same crazy-league as Cynthia McKinney.But I think McKinney was less malignant. Warren has the scruples of a gangster.
Wow, McKinney…. I think she wins all the ‘outer space’ awards and is more disconnected from reality than Warren. But perhaps that is because I spent a year living in Atlanta and heard/read first hand way too much of her nonsense and paranoia.
Hardest hit; Tom Friedman.
“… we just don’t do it very efficiently as state and local governments have proven to be very bad at managing infrastructure costs.”
Somebody tell Lizzy Warren and Tommy Friedman that economies of scale don’t pertain to the expansion of liberal ideas or to the growth of government.
China has some of the cleanest big cities on the planet.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005231/Chinas-ghost-towns-New-satellite-pictures-massive-skyscraper-cities-STILL-completely-empty.html
Dreams of instant gratification, whether physical, material, or ego, have consequences in the real world. Not only have the communists created a massive bubble for their profit and as a pretense to appease the people, but, a progressive number of Chinese recognize the environmental damage, human rights violations, and the simple deception of promises unfulfilled.
Americans should pay heed to their plight. We already have a large minority which has accepted involuntary exploitation (i.e. redistributive change) as normal. This is not to mention that a majority have set dreams of instant gratification as a priority in stark conflict with evolutionary principles. If it wasn’t for the large immigrant, legal and illegal, population, the illusion of a viable society would have already been broken.