Most of the items you buy on a day-to-day basis are cheap and low-tech. The American manufacturing sector has mostly advanced beyond Nike t-shirts and kid's toys. Instead, American workers are building high-tech, high value-added items such as BMW's, 747's and medical devices.
What kind of manufacturing industry do you want in this county, one that makes plastic knick-knacks or one that makes intercontinental jets?
If we make so much how come it is almost impossible to find anything American made to buy?
You're making a common mistake, I think. You look at the total number of items you buy versus the total value of such items. The average American buys many more Chinese made t-shirts every year than they do Ford trucks made in Kentucky. Yet, the Ford truck is worth many times more than the Chinese-made goods they bought.
The majority of the value of the goods I bought last year were made in the US.
Apparently you buy a lot more BMW's, 747's and medical devices than the rest of us do.
B'zzzt. Wrong, do you even know what "advanced" means?
"BUGGY-WHIP" Boogeyman ALERT, ALERT, ALERT!!!!
You have no idea how high a technology is currently involved in textile millinery...and the supporting manufacturing infrastructure.
Instead, American workers are building high-tech, high value-added items such as BMW's, 747's and medical devices.
Let's consider these examples in order:
BMW. Much of the BMW sub-componentry is imported from Germany . The plant in South Carolina is largely an assembly operation. And do you know why BMW built its plant in the U.S.? Because our labor was cheaper than theirs.
747's. 25 years ago we had Lockheed, McDonnell-DOuglas and Boeing all building commercial airliners, and no legitimate foreign source. Today, we have AirBus, where every single plane benefits from a 30% subsidy, with governmental "startup" "loans" that AirBus has never repaid..."loans" which paid for all the industrial plant, the R&D, and product development. All written off. Today, McDonnell-Douglas's commercial planes are gone. Lockheed's are gone. And Boeing, which gets no startup loans, or operating subsidy, the survivor, has been eclipsed in quantitative sales by AirBus two years running...much to the glee of France.
The 747 was built at the end of the 60's and early 70's...out of Boeing's own pocket. A huge roll of the dice with the Shareholder's money. And it was rewarded. But After 9-11 the company has openly discussed termination of any further 747 production, due to the paucity of orders. A plant which could build dozens at once, is reduced to having a handful liesurely go through the lines...and most of them just are just freighters, not passenger.
AirBus has been given over $10 billion in loans by the government consortium for its next big project, the "747-Killer" the A-385 super-jumbo. The 800-capacity jet which they hope (you can just see Chirac drooling) will destroy Boeing's commercial operations altogether. Fortunately, Boeing is not done yet. Although grossly handicapped by our government's free traders willful ignorance, wishful thinking and refusal to punish the market distortions of the foreign interference behind AirBus, they have a business plan which may keep the company alive. They have sacrificed their intellectual seed corn to several other countries...and enlisted their countries protectionist subsidies...for both bankrolling the tooling development of the new 787 "Dreamliner", and assure enough orders for the plane to be viable. They have given Japan the Wing contract for building the new carbon-fiber wingbox (far more advanced than Airbus's A-385...which is 7 tons overweight)..and will teach them all Boeing knows about wings and carbon fiber. Japan will buy a bunch of these planes. Meanwhile, China will make the Tail stabilizers. And Italy will make the center fuselage sections. Boeing will have a greatly reduced role in manufacture: Landing gear, the nose fuselage section, the tail section and integrate the avionics and assemble the snap-together modules.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen! We had during the 80's approximately 800,000 people employed in aerospace. Today, it is less than 125,000. And it promises to shrink further. E.g., GWB is insisting on going along with Clinton's-orchestrated outsourcing of U.S. defense procurement. He recently directed that an inferior (10 year old technology), British-made helicopter (Westland, built with UK Government money) be chosen over the brand-spanking new U.S. competitor (Sikorsky, developed with its own money) be chosen as the replacement for his Marine-One Helicopter fleet. He also will prematurely terminate in 2007 the US-built F-22 (95% US parts), and is instead going ahead with the vastly less-capable flying pig-farm, the F-35 which has in many cases (depending on version), less than 50% U.S. content...this desite the fact that 90+% of the R&D behind the F-35 is supplied by the U.S...not the foreign partners. He threatened to veto Duncan Hunter's (R-Chairman, House Armed Services Committee) Defense Bill mandating 65% domestic content in our defense procurements...until he got his anti-U.S. way.
As for medical devices: Great, if we were turning into the Borg! Consider this: How many of our people actually need to have ear and heart or prosthetic devices? And where is the money coming from for the devices? Insurance and Medicare mostly, is it not? These are not the kinds of things your populace routinely can afford out of their own pockets, or would seek for their regular needs. They are necessarily a narrow niche. And they aren't a normal market where people say, oh, I think I will get a Medtronic or Guidant pacemaker today. And I doubt the growth potential here. Hence, it may well not a sector that will really lift the whole economy. In fact, with Social Security and Medicare going bust...the latter sooner than the other, don't count on their being anything like the current market, let alone a bigger one in the future.
Meanwhile, everyone practically needs transportation, and clothes, and personal electronics (stereo, video, communications, information storage, and computing) however. And it is precisely these wrongly-disparaged "Buggy Whip" industries which we are allowing to be selectively seized by foreigners.