Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…If the Unites States stopped growing, I feel a lot of free countries in the world would collapse or be taken over, or they would become unfree. If we grow at a very low rate, our budget will explode It will cut back on our discretionary spending, our ability to advance science to protect the world against an asteroid coming. So, yes I absolutely think it applies today. I think I agree that if the US stops growing that would be very bad, principally because of the cultural and political effects that that would have and perhaps that we’ve started to see over the last five years. But doesn’t that suggest that we want a sufficiently high level of growth? One that keeps people happy and looking forward to the future and being willing to accept some negative shocks because they know that things are going to get better in the future anyway? And that we don’t necessarily have to go from 4 percent GDP growth to 8 percent GDP growth — that’s not necessarily going to make things more stable. You’re talking about going from 4 to 8 percent. You may or may not think that’s stabilizing, but the actual reality is, we’re in the midst of one of our most wonderful labor market recoveries, there’s been a big fiscal stimulus. And year on year, we’re doing 2.7 percent, which is very poor compared to our past performance. You see a lot of recoveries where we grow at 4 percent or more just to get back to where we were. The growth engine has slowed down. There’s a lot of evidence — some of which I present in my other books — that technological progress has slowed down. It doesn’t seem to me we’re close to the margin of growth being so fast that we’re thrown off the track. We have high level of debt in deficits, and we don’t know how to pay it off. And we’re cutting into our future capabilities with infrastructure and military defense, many areas, science.…

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