Quote:
Originally Posted by cglenhar
One of the hidden factors in the housing market crash is that income has stagnated during the Bush reign of terror on the middle class. People in the past could stretch for a while to make mortgage payments assured that their income would rise and so would the value of their property. The perfect storm happened when "trickle down" never became a reality with the greedy keeping all the benefits to themselves.
The only way to maintain a long term robust economy is to make things. We have given away all of our manufacturing and have such a trade imbalance that we will probably never recover our position in the world.
Sadly the only good that ever came from a war time economy, was prosperity from the building of the war machine. Now we don't even produce the steel that covers the tanks! That should scare anyone that can think about the repercussions of need to import war products.
When the factories are all offshore, where will Rosie the Riveter work?
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We have not 'given away' our manufacturing. A global workforce with an increase in quality, and lower wages/taxes, made the American tax/wage heavy industries move to the places where they could produce the same goods at a lower price. It's a new world! No longer can we compete on wages with India, China, Vietnam, or with their increase in education, or with their new found Capitalism. The government can not dictate where a business can produce it's goods. We don't even do a good job competing with foreign car manufacturers. Over and over again articles from publications like Consumer Reports tell us that cars like Toyota beat us on quality and dependability.
What we need to do to stay a strong economic country is produce better quality/dependable products, so that Americans will prefer to buy American. We also need to realize that we need to develop high tech industries that our workers can perform at a good wage, and not expect that labor intensive jobs like the auto industries and steel industries can compete globally, or in fact within our own economy, when less expensive, high quality products are available to us.