and the winner is...

[xchrom]

http://www.economist.com/node/21525983

[fasttense]

1. Raygun proved deficits don't matter. n/t

[onehandle]

2. And they don't even have to step into the ring. nt

[Creideiki]

3. Except that neither the US nor Europe have Debt problems, really

We both have employment problems.

The Euro central bank and the US Fed can handle the debt issues. They can't go to private corporations and make them hire people.

[bhikkhu]

4. Economic growth precedes employment growth, typically

...so you could also say that we don't have a debt problem, or an employment problem - we have an economic growth problem. You could also say that economic growth requires energy and resources; so perhaps we don't have an economic growth problem, we have an energy and resource problem.

...if you see the logic to that point (and admittedly there are other ways to look at it) then you could conclude, what we have is a "finite planet problem", and perhaps we are approaching the limits of the energy and resources we can extract from it profitably enough to fuel continuing growth.

[amborin]

5. +1

or a finite species problem....the planet will be just fine....it's other, non-human species that will all go extinct

[Creideiki]

6. Demand precedes growth. Can't fuel demand without getting people working.

Catch-22.

So either the US and Europe get people working so that they have money so they can consume, or the consumption model of economics won't work.

If you want the consumption model, then we need two things:

1) The First Rule of the Industrialist, as stated by Ford

2) People working. This was evidenced in the First Great Depression. Only the problem now isn't sticky wages--people have shown that they'll work for almost anything--the problem is that there aren't enough jobs to keep up with population growth, so we're relatively still losing jobs.

And we're back to demand preceding growth. BTW--we're supposed to expect the unemployment rate to be highest right toward the end of the recession right? Only the reason isn't that firing people sparks the economy, it's that once the economy starts recovering the people who left the workforce tend to re-enter it. Since we oddly measure unemployment as the percentage of people in the "labor force" who are unemployed, once there are more jobs, people tend to re-enter the work force.