Elect Fareed Zakaria Already

Can we just elect this guy President or something already? Or can Obama just do what Zakaria says? The dude comes correct.

Here is a smart point about the present state of the economy:

And yet something feels different this time. Technology and globalization are working together at warp speed, creating a powerful new reality. Many more goods and services can now be produced anywhere on the globe. China and India have added literally hundreds of millions of new workers to the global labor pool, producing the same goods and services as Western workers at a fraction of the price. Far from being basket-case economies and banana republics, many developing economies are now stable and well managed, and companies can do business in them with ease. At some point, all these differences add up to mean that global competition is having quite a new impact on life in the U.S.

Two weeks ago, for example, I sat in a Nano, the revolutionary car being produced by Tata Motors in India. It's a nice, comfortable midgetmobile, much like Mercedes-Benz's Smart car, except that rather than costing $22,000, it costs about $2,400. Tata plans to bring it to the U.S. in two to three years. Properly equipped with air bags and other safety features, it will retail at $7,000. Leave aside the car itself, whose price will surely put a downward pressure on U.S. carmakers. Just think about car parts. Every part in the Nano is made to global standards but manufactured in India at about a tenth of what it would cost in America. When Ford orders its next set of car parts, will they be made in Michigan or Mumbai?

The math is simple. Easy jobs can be done for cheaper overseas. Managing those easy jobs can be done cheaper overseas. Our cost of living is too expensive to be competitive for most manufactured goods. To justify our cost of living, we need to be producing shit that no one else can produce - examples - Hollywood movies, world wide pop stars, Apple ipods (although I bet they are built elsewhere), and other cool shit. If you ain't building that shit or doing shit that needs to be done local - teaching, police, fireman, etc, you're losing your job to Indians or Mexicans or Chinese eventually.

Why didn't anyone see this coming? What have economists been doing the past 30 years? How did we get into this ridiculous, unsustainable cycle where economic growth was based upon two falsities that propped each other up: inflated house prices, ie wealth and easy/cheap credit.

Now the chickens have come home to roost on this spin back loop of nonsense. It was as if a book author got paid to write a book, then wrote an anonymous positive review of the book for the newspaper to get some people to buy his book, and then bought more copies of the book with the money he was paid for book to further demonstrate he was a bankable author. Then he did it over and over for 30 years with the same cycle and finally someone who actually knows something said, maybe I ought to read this guy - he's published 30 books and then says "Shit, this book sucks why did all those reviewers and other people like the book so much? Just as the house of cards is about to collapse, we have other authors - who did the same thing as the first author - rush to the first authors defense and swear it is a good book and all his books are good (this is the bailout and stimulus). So the question is - when will it all stop? And are any of these dudes good authors?