Neither. Every dollar spent in an area usually turns over 4 times or multiplies 4 times depending on which way you want to state it. So the tax rebates were spent and each of those dollars created three more dollars before the money left the area. Nothing has removed the underlying weakness yet. Trickle down or supply side economics states that if you give the dollars to the manufacturers they will invest them in the economy creating more jobs and demand for goods and services. Manufacturing plants are primarily outside the United States. Costs are rising for companies manufacturing things in China and other more advanced economies of the developing world forcing companies to go to Vietnam and other less developed countries and presumably, to African countries eventually. Africa has many wars and is likely to develop more as people fight over land and resources. All this and more means that the economy will stay relatively stable until after this years elections and then there will be serious problems. In the 1930’s the economic slowdown was approximately 12 years long. A crash like that is concievably possible again. There were the roaring 20’s then the crash of the 30’s that world war II ended due to the need for manufacturing for the war effort.
I think the rise will help the economy as a whole but I really don’t think that it will help the average American worker. Lest we forget that now much of our manufacturing is done overseas, so even if an American company has a big order to fill the workers doing it are in a foreign country. The corporate line is padded which helps the economy on paper but the people actually seeing the fruits of their labor are the CEOs and the workers in foreign plants. I’m from Michigan, we know all about that!
The U.S is an 80% consumer economy.
Where are the good being manufactured. So we are shipping 80% of our GDP overseas to countries that really don’t like us. So we should see daylight about the time that our economy starts working on a manufacturing basis again.
Ya, ya, we are a service provider but who makes the pyramid work. The middle class and thier money is being shipped overseas. So our economy will rise when the worlds does, not the other way around!