Report Card for Donald Trump

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Corporate spending ultimately must be paid for by revenue that comes from consumer spending.

Or from equity markets, or exports, etc.

Quote:If the new corporate spending is paid from with new consumer spending then it is part of a leading sector. If the corporate spending is paid for by savings then it doesn't act as a leading sector. This is because the growth is IT infrastructure is offset by shrinkage elsewhere in the economy. The advertising is simply an easy to identify example of this cost shifting.

Some of this spending does constitute a leading sector. For example online gaming requires good network infrastructure and a lot of hardware.  I paid a premium for my PC simply so I could play my favorite game at a reasonable pace. This is real leading sector stuff.  I'm sure we could think of many other examples.  

The only online material I have on this stuff is the two links I game above. The size concept is only in my fourth book.

https://www.amazon.com/Cycles-American-P...0595327214

I stopped looking into this stuff around 2004, as I was starting to shift into looking at this stuff from a political-economic pov as opposed to economic-political.

So what you're saying is that you haven't really done any work on this for over a decade, and you have no way of telling how much of it constitutes new demand, how much is new demand diverted overseas by trade policy, how much is cost shifting, etc.?  Then what has all of this been about?

Quote:It doesn't show that.  To do that you would have to look at how employment and automation evolved over time in all four countries.  Industrialization began in the US earlier than any of these countries, also Japan and Germany received a set back in WW II, which likely results in the loss of a decade or two worth of development, making their starts effectively later than they actually were.  That is, where the US is could simply reflect that fact that the US is further along its development track.  To check this out you might look at Britain, who is further past the Industrial Revolution than are we.

It clearly shows higher level of manufacturing employment.  And Germany clearly industrialized at the same time as US, with its big spurt in the late 19th century.  You're just making things up, here.  If the US were further along some inevitable manufacturing track than the others, and the UK further still, wouldn't they have HIGHER levels of automation?  Where is this claim that manufacturing has a defined lifecycle coming from?