Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
The U.S. does not need a return to wild consumption; it needs a return to the times when it saved enough to at least sustain its industrial output without a trade balance deficit. Consumption could easily drop by a fourth at the very same time of industrial recovery.
How can you have an industrial recovery while consumption falls? What do you propose to do with that increasing industrial output?

You can't look realistically at the US trade deficit without looking at artificially inflated value of the dollar that prevailed during the half century or so after WW2. These distortions tend to have an impact.

In any event it is easy to issue declarations about what the US needs or does not need to do. Developing policies to move a nation in such a direction is a good deal more difficult. Economies don't move by executive fiat.