Rumor has it that bacon was the only meat served on Mount Olympus.

Bacon even makes chocolate better.

@ Tv and Rosemary

I am in good company

This!!
I really value your opinion, Ms. Harmony.

Don't forget the bacon everything taste better with bacon~~~

You are in more dire need of a baconing than any white woman in history.

Bacon is not good either.

You are touching on the expansion of an economy. This is a closely related area, where things are being done very wrong right now.

The way an economy expands in a HEALTHY way, is that the increases in productivity allow more to benefit from products and services, more wealth to be created, and enough additional jobs to be created, to take up the natural growth in the population, as well as any people who emigrate.

Raising prices does NOT cause an increase in production. Perhaps you are referring to forcing a reduction in demand.

We have been seeing FALSE economic expansions going on here for a long time now. The bubbles that deflated in the eighties and nineties, and the one that burst and almost destroyed us entirely in 2005, were all false expansions. Additional wealth was not created, all that was done was to create additional profits in cash. The internet caused a lot of investors to imagine that it magically created money, when all that was really going on, was a lot of people buying advertising time from each other. When they finally woke up to the fact that there has to be hard products at realistic prices to drive it all, it fell apart. Before that, the expansion of the eighties was driven by lots of government spending (expanding the military and related things), at the cost of unbalancing our deficits.

The worst fakery, was the subprime loan insanity that led to the near collapse. There was ZERO real wealth creation going on there, just a lot of rich people borrowing money, investing it in the HOPE that real estate prices would continue to rise for no reason at all, and that one day everyone could cash out with huge profits, all from nothing at all. It collapsed when suddenly everyone realized that the king had no clothes, and that all that everyone was trading for cash, was each other's imaginations.

In short, it isn't JUST things like raising wages by rote, that is an artificial distortion of an economy. Lots of things are, which people aren't recognizing.

Indeed. Which is why I emphasize the DETAILS of the exchanges. When the circulation of money takes the wealth OUT of the economy, the circulation you refer to is defeated.

This is why there has been a huge increase since 1980 in the relative incomes of the one percent, versus everyone else.

Right now, US regulations have been "adjusted" to favor the ability of multinationals to wick away the wealth of the customer class of Americans. As long as that continues, things will get worse.