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The evils of globalization. Well, I'm not exactly sure what globalization means in this context. The problems Greider points out, or at lease eludeds to, are more of a matter of our markets being more open than the markets of other countries we trade with.

While having a trade deficit isn't desirable, I think the author is missing a very important fact. America has consistently had a trade deficit, and we are the richest country on earth.

Obviously having a trade deficit hasn't destroyed us yet, and liberals have been complaining about it and free trade as far back as I can remember.

Yes, we are in debt to China. Another way of looking at that is that China is being forced to buy up huge sums of American dollars to keep their currency artificially deflated to keep their economy growing and encourage investment to build infrastructure.

We should be worried about China's economic investment making them even more competitive in the future. We should also put more pressure on them to let their currency float and to loosen to protections on their markets.

However, the American people like buying their goods inexpensively, inflation is low, unemployment is pretty low and seems to be getting better. Our economy is recovering and growing.

My wife is currently out of work and looking for a job, but while some us are individually suffering some financial hardships, the country is doing pretty well.

Our trade deficit is awfully high right now. We don't want it to remain this high. However, there very well may be benefits to allowing it to be high right now.

There have been people saying our trade deficit is going to cause economic ruin in the near future for as long as I remember. If all our jobs are going overseas, then why do we have lower unemployment than all these nations that he's saying have better economic policy?

Where's the evidence of impending disaster that's been long predicted?

"For years, elite opinion dismissed the buildup of foreign indebtedness as a trivial issue. Now that it is too large to deny, they concede the trend is "unsustainable." That's an economist's euphemism which means: things cannot go on like this, not without ugly consequences for American living standards. But why alarm the public? The authorities assure us timely policy adjustments will fix the matter."

Years where we had lower unemployment than those other countries.

Years where our economy was growing faster than theirs.

Maybe the economists are just sick of people crying wolf about the trade deficit all the time?

Saying that the trade deficit isn't sustainable isn't saying that we're facing impending doom. If we were there should be other indicators such as increasing unemployment. It does mean that the trade deficit is something we should be concerned about and try and shift policy toward reducing it without making drastic changes that would wreak havoc on our economy.

We just dramatically increased our national dept due to reacting to a major terrorist attack on 9/11 and being woken up to the fact that we had neglected our military.

We're paying a high price for that neglect economically, but even while paying that high price we're doing better than our competitors.

Eight years of Clinton neglecting our military resulted in us being poorly prepared, and forced us to spend more money than we should have had to in order to ramp our capabilities back up quickly.

We need to meet our responsibilities in restoring the military, and we need to rebuild our intelligence infrastructure that was trashed by the Clinton administration.

However in the long term, we need to get spending under control, and start reducing the debt.

If we keep our debt under control, and we keep unemployment undercontrol, it doesn't amtter that we're spending more money buying foreign goods than they spend buying our goods. That's what you would expect from the richest country in the world.