Most people are not aware of the horrible facts: Thirty years ago, we, the United States, were the biggest manufacturer and exporter in the world. We were also the largest creditor in the world, loaning money all over the world.
Today we are the world’s biggest importer and also the world’s largest debtor!!
We have a monstrous deficit, promised to plague us for generations to come. We face 10% unemployment. Our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced overseas, and even research and development is something we prefer to outsource to other countries. Why? Because the cost of production is lower and quality far better than just acceptable.
We face the dilemma of Free Trade and outsourcing versus creating jobs at home and inducing we Buy American, we buy products we create rather than those we import. And obviously we don’t just import handmade items such as hand-loomed textile arts, we import machine made, products made based on technologies we often pioneered.
We live in an economy where four largest banks – Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, CITIBANK and Bank of America own assets that are about half of our annual GDP. And top 1% of the population controls 50% of the wealth.
In 1997 we were instrumental in giving China Most Favored Nation status and within three to five short years millions of jobs were outsourced to China, imports were pouring in and importing from China has become a way of life.
We followed with NAFTA agreement that perpetuated similar trend as jobs were being lost to Mexico. Importing from the Third World became the game and reading the product marking showing the country of origin turned into a fascinating course in geography.
We were fed the merits of Free Trade and Buy American since the 80s and both were hailed as the way to go. Soon Americans no longer cared where the product was made as it was so cheap and consumer spending skyrocketed in the tail end of 20th century.
But that was before the consequences started to take effect, before unemployment, before the deficit, foreclosures, and realization that we were way down the list of countries in quality of education, and quality of gross domestic happiness in general, if there is a way to measure it. Never mind the diminished middle class, escalating ranks of those below poverty line, and a country where a third has either no health insurance or is seriously underinsured.
Let’s face it, not only our life expectancy is among the lowest of the developed world, it is even lower than that of many Third World countries. Frankly, by all indicators we have become a Third World country!
