I have a hard time "blaming" management or unions. they both do what they have to do.

What we need to think of as a society is how we want to maintain our standard of living. We have exported most of the manufacturing because we don't want to pay USA-made prices for goods, and believe if it can be made more inexpensive elsewhere (shipping included), that's the better bargain.

Since I have been alive I've seen manufacturing leapfrog out of the USA to many different countries.

First it was to Japan, and "made in Japan" became synonymous with "cheap and poor quality." However, after a while, Dr. Deming's philosophies worked their magic, and costs for Japanese goods went up concurrent with the quality.

Next, Taiwan and other countries in the Pacific Rim became the "Made in ...." centers, keeping up the tradition of reducing the price well below Made-In-USA, and even more of the manufacturing base went away.

Along came NAFTA, and while it didn't move that much North, a significant number of products (especially subsystems/components) went to Mexico.

Today, almost everything I see has a "Made in China" tag.

There is an obvious pattern to all of this - we buy more goods where the labor is exploited than not. We would rather turn a blind eye to the exploitation than Buy American.

So, it seems that we will continue to maintain our standard of living as consumers by buying foreign-made stuff where the labor is paid wages we wouldn't offer a despised in-law. The Balance of Payments is so far out of whack it cannot even be accurately measured anymore, and blue-collar manufacturing is disappearing in all the traditional toolbelt areas within this country. We have sold ourselves a story that everyone in the USA must have a college degree and a white-collar job to be successful, and as a result more and more of today's youth are willing to sit on their hands rather than get them dirty earning blue-collar money.

Now we have found ourselves heavily reliant on illegal aliens working at slave wages and conditions in the USA (and want again to turn a blind eye to the human condition) because if they weren't being exploited, our costs for goods would increase accordingly.

Yes, the economy is going to H#&&, but it is our greed as consumers - not management and unions - which deserves the lion's share of the "credit."