yes and no, if we let things operate as they should (banks fail, forced to liquidate overpriced assets) then these trade imbalances would not be such a problem. You can't really fight against offshoring things that are far more expensive to do over here. If you do the companies that you try to protect will figure out the consumer doesn't have a choice but to buy crap and you get economic stagnation from lack of competition just like happened in India after Ghandi's principles were legislated.
Wait a second. There's no law that says only one or two American companies are allowed to produce certain types of goods. We have a nation of 300+ million people. Surely that population can support multiple separate manufacturers who can compete with one another.
Furthermore, a zero-dollar trade deficit does not mean "no international trade or foreign competition at all", it just means that we need to produce and sell as much value in goods and services as what we bring in. If a particular industry were uncompetitive then Americans could import the same product as a foreign good while exporting something else. Also, foreign companies could be allowed to set up shop in the U.S. (like the Japanese auto companies were forced to do).
Liberals foam at the mouth just as much too...especially over those republicans.
I think the problem is deeper than you make it. Because of mechanized production and offshored production, we shifted a lot of jobs over to unimportant things like "marketing" and "business" when we have to be employing a lot more engineers and designers to produce new things.
The problem is that you can't have an entire economy based on people's working as engineers, designers, scientists, and innovators. At best an economy could support 5% of the populace to do those jobs? What about the other 95%? (We already have an oversupply of unemployed and underemployed or underemployed-and-involuntarily-out-of-field PhD. scientists. I'm not sure how producing more scientists would help the economy.)
The things you produce should be able to sell themselves based on the need-- a company should see their business model and say "hey, we need a product that does xyz, lets search for it, oh there's one let's buy it" instead of me as a designer employing hundreds of marketers to fly around the country and convince people that their company needs product xyz.
I've always tended to regard marketing as a waste of money, too. I guess it pays for our radio and TV programming. It has some economic value in making people aware of new and better products.
Manufacturing is a dead horse, nobody here would make McDonalds widgets anyways. The jobs where we actually produced something have moved on to things that require a college education. It's typical that the manufacturing crowd wouldn't understand this need to be re-educated...seeing as they weren't educated in the first place.
We already have a large oversupply of people with college degrees. Also, just where are these college-degree-requiring jobs? What percentage of all the jobs out there actually make real use of a college degree? Perhaps 15%? If you stop and think about it, how many "desk jobs" are actually out there? (Not all of those require a college degree anyway.)
(As a result of "credential inflation" businesses are able to require that job applicants have college degrees, using it as a screening tool for IQ and responsibility because they can, not because the job actually makes any use of college education.)
Manufacturing is still very needed. Look around you. Do you see all of those high-tech electronic items? Do you see the computer? Do you see your laser printer? Do you see the flat screen TV? Can you see the telephone? Can you see your desk? In the kitchen do you see fancy nonstick pans? Do you see any light bulbs? Do you own a washing machine? Do you own a car? Do you own a house?
All of that stuff is real wealth! Pieces of paper and electrons might have value, but they are not the same as real physical wealth. (The only value they are liable to have is that they might relate to physical wealth in some sort of a way.) All of that those items were produced in a factory (or in the case of a house, constructed). Manufacturing is where the wealth comes from.
Manufacturing is not dead. It's the U.S. economy that shunned manufacturing that is dead.
If we taxed the financial elite to pay for it, there are other economies where their money can get better return and won't be taxed away. They're free to just move it wherever they please. They're the most mobile class of all of us. And if their money leaves, how are new companies supposed to get loans to start producing new products? We don't want to be like the UK where no new companies have actually made it in like 50 years.
Our nation's doors are open. Any traitors who want to leave are free to renounce their citizenship (or have it revoked) and leave permanently (or get kicked out). Of course we may have to seize some wealth from some of these people first if it's determined that they essentially stole money in various ways from the lower classes. These people do not have a monopoly on the ability to be entrepreneurial and I'm sure that eager and ambitious Americans would happily take their place.
The point I'm trying to make is this: there is no solution. The jobs moved on and you can't move them back to manufacturing. It just won't work-- not that it's not feasible to try, but that if you do it won't work economically. The jobs moved onto better things that require an education and more brainpower.
The last time I looked, people go to stores to purchase manufactured items, not boxes of "brain power".
But we don't need as many of those jobs as we needed of the manufacturing jobs. Go read Player Piano, that's exactly what's happening.
The high tech robotic manufacturing still requires having people to design the robots and to service them, etc. There are still jobs attached to the manufacturing process. If the cost of manufactured goods decreased then more money would be available to spend elsewhere, employing people in other fields.
The problem is that we've sent all of that manufacturing work and the jobs associated with it overseas. We've also sent a great many of those knowledge-based jobs overseas or filled them domestically with foreigners on H-1B and L-1 visas.
Instead of having the cost savings of more efficient manufacturing methods cycle back into the economy, it is leaking out to other nations and going into the pockets of the wealthy as profit. (Since there is more labor available worldwide, not only are they manufacturing more efficiently, they're also paying workers less money.)
Automobiles replaced buggy whips and our nation's economy chugged on. Light bulbs replaced candles and our nation's economy chugged on. There's no reason why robots replacing workers should have any different effect. What's different today is that we are sending the jobs overseas.
) investors do. And if making a widget is cheaper in China than in Louisville, well, so be it. And this whole thing of China making shit is, well, shit. Do they make some shit? Sure, but so do we. But the fact is, they make products worthy of a global market. And their exports prove that.
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