Boom Times Ahead?

The consensus outlook for the U.S. economy is, to put it mildly, pretty bleak. The boomers are retiring, the debt-fueled consumer-spending binge of the 2000s has ground to a halt with nothing to replace it, and American manufacturing workers are trapped in a brutal competition with hundreds of millions of cheap, eager workers from all over the developing world.

Worst of all, as middle-income Americans get squeezed, the very richest...

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