Trade Equilibrium, Jobs, & Stimulus

As long as the U.S. continues to have huge trade deficits, the American jobs would continue to be off-shored and no net new jobs can be created. Spending billions of American stimulus dollars would end up stimulating foreign economies. It would be like taking wealth from the American workers and giving it to their foreign counterpart. Traditional techniques such as tax cuts for the rich (fiscal policies), lower interest rates (monetary policies), and “buy American” (patriotic appeals) have failed to solve the problems. In order to spur its economy and jobs, the U.S. “must” adopt, as its “mission,” bringing parity between its imports and exports. Secondly, it must help its trading partners understand the benefits of using their surplus American dollars to buy American products. The “Trade Equilibrium” so established would help multiply trade between countries, increase corporate profits, and create jobs

Sampling and Super-resolution of Sparse Signals Beyond the Fourier Domain

Recovering a sparse signal from its low-pass projections in the Fourier domain is a problem of broad interest in science and engineering and is commonly referred to as super-resolution. In many cases, however, Fourier domain may not be the natural choice. For example, in holography, low-pass projections of sparse signals are obtained in the Fresnel domain. Similarly, time-varying system identification relies on low-pass projections on the space of linear frequency modulated signals. In this paper, we study the recovery of sparse signals from low-pass projections in the Special Affine Fourier Transform domain (SAFT). The SAFT parametrically generalizes a number of well known unitary transformations that are used in signal processing and optics. In analogy to the Shannon's sampling framework, we specify sampling theorems for recovery of sparse signals considering three specific cases: (1) sampling with arbitrary, bandlimited kernels, (2) sampling with smooth, time-limited kernels and, (3) recovery from Gabor transform measurements linked with the SAFT domain. Our work offers a unifying perspective on the sparse sampling problem which is compatible with the Fourier, Fresnel and Fractional Fourier domain based results. In deriving our results, we introduce the SAFT series (analogous to the Fourier series) and the short time SAFT, and study convolution theorems that establish a convolution--multiplication property in the SAFT domain.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures, manuscript under revie

Futility of Stimulus Funds in the Middle of Huge Trade Deficits

The U. S. is facing an unprecedented environment of increasing unemployment, declining income, disappearing middleclass, and mounting trade deficit (about $731 billion in 2007). The government is providing stimulus funds to a selected number of organizations to help solve these problems. However, as long as the country continues to have huge trade deficits, these stimulus efforts may not help much, if at all. They may even worsen the economic situation. This could happen if the banking, insurance, construction, transportation, and other companies—receiving the stimulus funds—would offshore part of their production activities. Several American firms send certain number of jobs abroad on a regular basis. To continue to do so in the current tougher times would be only natural. There is no condition in the stimulus packages that would keep them from doing so. “Buy American” slogans may not much help persuade American consumers to buy the American products when, instead, they can go for the less expensive products made abroad