Economic fact of life

When I was still employed by a corporation, they had quarterly meetings to tell all of us how well the company was doing, and how close we were to meeting the "projected sales" and such. One factor always included was the growth rate for sales - usually 5% to 10% every year.

I always thought this was unrealistic, but never articulated it like Karl Denninger:

The problem is that not everyone can produce more tomorrow and nobody can do so on a compounded growth rate into the indefinite future.
Consider the athlete.  He runs a 4:10 mile.  He might be able to improve his time by 4% or so in the next year with training, and in doing so cross the "magical" 4 minute mile barrier.  But he cannot continue to improve at a rate of 4% a year forever; that is a physical impossibility.

Most American businesses project increased sales every year. How can anyone believe that there will be an ever-escalating increase in sales of any one product? Sooner or later the market gets saturated, or tastes change, or technology moves on, and sales of that old reliable product will drop off.

The company I mentioned systematically laid off engineers and factory workers, closed it's manufacturing facilities and sold the equipment to Chinese firms, and now outsources most engineering and all but a tiny bit of manufacturing to China. It's just a warehouse now, unloading container trucks from China and reloading the goods into trucks bound for big box stores.

And Osama thinks he's going to reverse the trend by pushing for "green" technology that no one wants or can afford, and taxing the very people who would be hiring for their factories if the federal government had not taxed and regulated them out of the country.

Shut down every federal bureau not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, eliminate all taxes on businesses except a sales tax and perhaps import duties, and eliminate all taxes on individuals. Then maybe we will see "Made in America" on more stuff at Wal-Mart.