9 Reasons Why Brazil Is The New America

[FarCenter]

Here are his main points:
-The U.S. is leveraged and Brazil is underleveraged. Brazil's growth has to do with income growth, not credit expansion.
-Demographically speaking, Brazil is poised for consumption. "Brazilian GDP has the potential to grow by an additional 2.5% a year solely as a result of demographic bonus that has increased the country’s most economically productive age group (15 to 64) to 130 million," according to a University of Minas Gerais study.
-Brazil’s median age is 28.9, "low and at the beginning of the consumption cycle" (the U.S. is older at 36).
-Brazil has seen 15 million jobs created in the past eight years, and its per capita GDP has more than doubled in the last 10.
-Brazil has plenty of fertile land available for use, 865 million unused arable acres. That’s more than 2.5 times as large as U.S. farm land.
-On Rome’s America's future: “The U.S. government is doomed to bankruptcy. Indeed it is already bankrupt. Never in the history of the world has any government owed as much money as the U.S. Treasury owes today.”
-In terms of energy, Brazil is growing at a time when oil and other energy-dense fuels are becoming scarce and more expensive.
-Other BRICS countries have water scarcity issues, but Brazil is the "Saudi Arabia of water" – Brazil has just 5.7% of the world’s landmass but 20% of the world’s freshwater flows through the Amazon basin.
-When it comes to new energy like biofuels, Brazil does it big (721.4 million liters of biodiesel a year)

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/brazil-is-the-new-america-2013-7

[Benton D Struckcheon]

1. Mostly true

One thing you get with a young workforce is more inflation, though. Lots of young entrants means low productivity - they all have to be trained, after all - and that will mean inflation. Little noticed here in the US was that the high inflation of the late seventies coincided with the entrance into the labor force of the largest part of the baby boom. That wasn't a coincidence.

[Rstrstx]

2. If Brazil is the next US the world is in deep trouble

Those things like arable farmland and water that you mention happen to be mostly in the Amazonian rainforest, if it's cut down do you have any idea what would happen to the global ecosystem and climate? Tropical rainforests are massive carbon sinks. The areas that aren't are still highly diverse bioregions and many thousands of unique plants and animals would be destroyed.

[FarCenter]

5. True, but we cut down most of the oak, hickory, chestnut forest east of the Mississippi

The Amazon Basin is Brazil's just as much as Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are ours.

And the Passenger Pigeon isn't coming back.

[Rstrstx]

7. Yes, but it was temperate forest

They can only process a fraction of the carbon of what a tropical rainforest (especially Amazonian rainforest) can chew through. And most of it was done back in the 1800s when nobody had the first clue as to what impacts it may have had on global climate. In Europe their forests were cleared many centuries before that.

Normally I'm not an extreme environmental radical but even a moderate has to realize the disastrous results that would occur if you strip the Amazonian ecosystem bare. You're destroying the single biggest land-based carbon sink on the planet.

Any serious proposal of climate talks has to address the dramatic rate of rainforest destruction if we're serious about the matter. And if that means encouraging the Brazilians to develop their economy elsewhere then so be it. Or perhaps the planet needs to pay a Brazil-tax so they can leave the Amazon alone, after all the entire planet is benefiting from it.

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. All that undeveloped land - it's the Amazonian rainforest.

The lungs of the planet.

[libodem]

4. And they have that unique

Wax procedure.

[kalli007]

6. THIS made me lol

[railsback]

8. Brazil will collapse upon itself

but not before destroying the rain forests first.

[AZ Progressive]

9. They gotta do something about their crime rate

15 of Brazil's cities are on the list of the top 50 dangerous cities in the world. The state of Sao Paulo (which is about population 40 million and has the largest city in Brazil, the same name) had about 4,100 murders last year, more than 1/4th of all the murders in the United States.