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I disagree that “they” are killing us. IMO, “we” are killing us.

A lot of manufacturing, and other, jobs have left the US (or perhaps more accurately, new jobs are being created elsewhere that we are used to being “ours”). A large part of the world is “emerging”, just like we did a hundred and some odd years ago when we moved from a 95% agricultural labor force to 5% . That’s just going to happen. We have had a very odd position for quite awhile (why should the US have a larger economy than China, when they have like four times as many people as we do?) That just can’t last forever.

As these nations emerge, their wages are going to rise in relation to ours That’s just the way it’s going to be. No amount of tariffs or trade barriers, etc, are going to change the fact that the world is not going to want to continue to pay much higher wages to US workers if they can get the same quality product elsewhere for less.

What we should be doing is taking advantage of this (temporarily) cheap labor. We could be, and to some extent are, robbing these people blind. Again, it won’t last, but why not buy stuff when it’s on sale?

Unfortunately, we’re making a couple huge mistakes. One, we’re buying cheap crap that needs to be replaced (or in the case of offshoring IT, we’re getting crap service that’s almost always, in my experience, not even worth what we’re paying for it).

The other, and IMO the really huge mistake, is that we are paying people not to work and pricing others out of the job market via things like minimum wage and Obamatax, which then drives folks to look for “alternative” (aka illegal) sources of labor. I hate any sort of monkeying around with the free market, but what really drives me up the wall here is what that nonsense is going to do to our work ethic. How are teenagers going to learn the value of earning a dollar? How are teenagers going to learn what it feels like to have large amounts of their pay confiscated before they ever see it, and start voting Conservative from day one (well, if they have the opportunity — I voted for GHWB when I was 18, but only because Reagan couldn’t run again)?

The world is changing. We can’t stop that. I believe in American Exceptionalism. I think that Americans are, while still imperfect as all but One man will ever be, on the whole better people than the rest of the world. But our unique economic position is not going to last forever. As the world changes, we need to be taking advantage of the opportunities presented by change in a way that maximizes value in the long term. I don’t think we’re doing that. We’re doing the opposite, using our good credit to borrow ourselves into bankruptcy so we don’t have to break a sweat (that’s a general statement, not meant to insult the millions of honest hard working Americans who wake up sore every morning just to go out and do it again).