THIS is what's killing the US economy:

[jmowreader]

74. You are broke because you make too little, not because someone else makes too much

I know Class Warfare is a popular meme, but it's not really true. There is enough money to pay both CEOs and workers well. To me, graphics like this are kinda like putting a picture of a Trabant next to one of a Corvette and saying, "Look how terrible German cars are!"

The real thing that is killing the economy - if indeed it IS being killed - is far deeper than you can put on a Facebook graphic. And lest you believe I'm just ripping on the left for this, I guarantee there's a teabagger sitting at home in front of his Cheeto-smeared keyboard making a graphic showing how welfare or high taxes are to blame for the state of the economy.

All of these things are responsible:
1. We have become a net importer of manufactured goods. Our major exports are commodities...which people in other countries turn into finished goods and send back for profit. When "America was great," America shipped the steel you needed to make a car AS a car. Now we ship it as iron ore, and let someone else turn it into a car.

1a. I better point out the wealth-creating industries of mining, forestry, agriculture and manufacturing.

2. Our internal economic activity revolves around selling services to other Americans - in other words, passing dollars between ourselves. Eventually someone's going to buy a sandwich with some of those dollars, taking them out of circulation entirely. We need massive exports of finished goods to increase the money supply - and "massive exports of finished goods" is exactly what we no longer have.

3. We practice "checkbook innovation." Think hard: when was the last time someone introduced a new brand of anything that wasn't a tech device? (Splitting your company into three pieces and giving each piece a new name doesn't count.) An example that comes to mind: The WD-40 Company wanted to sell soap to the people who were already buying their oil. Fifty years ago, WD-40 would have bought a soap machine and introduced "WD-40 Mechanic's Super Soap"...which, considering how much people love WD-40, would have done very well in the marketplace. It's not 50 years ago. They bought the Lava Soap line. About as good as it gets is adding new products to existing lines...and, once again, they're much more likely to just buy something.

4. Long-term planning is now three months out. In the 1950s, people planned YEARS ahead.

5. The stock market has NO tolerance for sales slowdowns, even normal cyclical ones. To make Wall Street happy, companies will shed employees like a Labrador Retriever in April if sales drop a tenth of a percent. In the old days, "this too shall pass" was kind of a corporate mantra: keep those workers on the payroll, even if you only bring them in half-days, because you will need them again.

6. They also have no tolerance for what they consider overspending. Could...oh, Walmart...pay $12 an hour to all its employees without sending prices through the roof? Probably, but Wall Street wouldn't like it. So they won't do it.

What America needs most is a massive "insourcing" effort. We HAVE to bring manufacturing back to the United States - and none of the candidates are talking about it. Instead, we get Hillary wanting to have people pass money around 50 percent faster than before, and Bernie wanting to pass it twice as fast. Without more wealth-creating industries, we're screwed no matter who we choose as president.