Where is the US economy headed?

"America is on a “Hot War Footing”: House Legislation Paves the Way for War with Russia?"

we are not going to war with Russia, if we did there would be hell to pay from the Europeans, and if not now then soon the Chinese too.

You touched on the "labor participation rate." I hate that statistic which was mentioned often in the last election cycle.
Would you be willing to try to explain how that is calculated?

(Note that I’m using the word “income,” not “wages,” as Young Invincibles itself and some journalists have when writing about the findings. That’s because the group is measuring annual, not hourly, pay—which unfortunately makes it a little tough to interpret their stats with any depth. The report’s authors told me they didn’t know whether young adult incomes were falling because workers were making less per hour, or because they were working fewer hours total.2 My guess is it has more to do with the latter—given the post-recession rise of joblessness and part-time employment.)

Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment.

At the same time, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs. Foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs in which high school graduates like Mr. Walsh once could earn $40 an hour, or more. The poll found that 85 percent of prime-age men without jobs do not have bachelor’s degrees. And 34 percent said they had criminal records, making it hard to find any work.

The resulting absence of millions of potential workers has serious consequences not just for the men and their families but for the nation as a whole. A smaller work force is likely to lead to a slower-growing economy, and will leave a smaller share of the population to cover the cost of government, even as a larger share seeks help.

“They’re not working, because it’s not paying them enough to work,” said Alan B. Krueger, a leading labor economist and a professor at Princeton. “And that means the economy is going to be smaller than it otherwise would be.”

Foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs in which high school graduates like Mr. Walsh once could earn $40 an hour, or more.

A smaller work force is likely to lead to a slower-growing economy, and will leave a smaller share of the population to cover the cost of government, even as a larger share seeks help.

I am getting very worried that underworked and under appreciated (some of you may have noticed my detailed arguments against the feminists and many of their programs, and their having teamed up with the government) young men are going to blow up, and decide to set fire to this nation that has acted for all their lives like we dont give a damn about men.....about them.

Scary times.

The fundamental problem is that technology is displacing manual labor.

It's just that now, instead of flowing into the pockets of assembly-line workers, it's going to pockets of whoever owns the robots that are replacing those workers.

None of this has anything to do with "feminism"

The money to support them is still there, but it's now in the hands of the people who own the robots.

Don't worry about them "blowing up" or "setting fire" to anything; the US police are sufficiently militarized to kill anyone who steps out of line.

After all, Sears has effectively been in liquidation from the day Mr. Lampert bought it. Whether liquidation was his original motive will forever be debated by investors; the secretive Mr. Lampert is unlikely to spill the beans.

And while he has talked a good game about wanting to be a retailer, he has acted like a liquidator; even when he was purporting to focus on Sears' retail operations, Mr. Lampert was engaged in a series of financial engineering transactions that loaded the company with debt while doing nothing to improve the business.

For years he starved the stores of capital expenditures while buying back stock at prices as high as $180 per share. Besides myself, very few people were critical of these buybacks at the time since Mr. Lampert was being hailed as the "new Warren Buffett" by the consistently clueless financial media.

It was obvious that the retail business was being deprived of capital while Mr. Lampert was attempting to shrink the share count and maximize his ownership of the company.

There are two ways to interpret this. Either he was being extremely shortsighted in seeking to increase the ownership of his hedge fund, ESL Investments, and squeeze out minority shareholders, or alternatively he realized that changes in the retail industry doomed Sears, and rather than squander precious capital on the stores he decided it was more prudent to purchase stock.

Buy short.