Thanks for the comments Mark.  You are absolutely right!  We in the US are struggling while the rest of the world is building a new infrastructure that will be competitive with ours...in many cases more advanced than ours.   We are still richer as a nation than almost everywhere else but that difference is decreasing rapidly.  To produce good long lasting jobs we must compete with the rest of the world which is getting difficult. This is a problem that has building for 50 years here.  We have, more and more, spent our money and focus on selling each other consumer goods and services ignoring the basic infrastruture necessary to be a world class competitor.  In our business, in residential real estate, we collectively bought into the concept of "leverage up to catch up" meaning that real estate speculation was attempted by just about everyone to replace fundamental real wealth building.

To rebuild and deleverage is extremely painful...a huge financial and social cost!  We are all touched by this rebuilding and deleveraging on a individual basis while the US government is leveraging up to replace us with band-aid fixes. It will be painful for a long time but if we swap our fundamental need to modernize in order  to satisfy populist needs... we will not be dealing with the problem.  This is a major trade off that might very well cause only a temporary fix.