"I don't like what I see and the caption that I copied at the top of this response should cause any honest person some sobering thoughts on this subject."
I'm with you, DoughtyOne. I don't like what I see either. Too much of our economy is either a Ponzi scheme, or a stream of outsourcing, or an influx of H1-B visas, or a loss of manufacturing jobs (great for when another war comes along and half of our manufacturing base is decimated). Plus too much of our real estate, Treasury bonds, etc. are now owned by foreign entities. Plus our workers are losing their pension plans, medical plans, and any security for their old age.
This globalism stuff is not at all to my liking, and major corporations in this country are acting more like internationalists, and less like American companies. Does not bode well for the future. Yes, I know the stock market is up at the moment. But it can come down just as easily, as it did during the stock market bubble that burst not that many years ago. Countries can't survive on being service industries alone. Without a decent manufacturing base, we put ourselves at jeopardy in times of crisis, just like the pickle we are in right now because of our oil needs while being at the mercy of unfriendly countries who control most of the world's oil. Pretty soon we won't have much of a U.S. car industry, and so many manufacturing companies have now left this country, or the manufacturing work is being done elsewhere in the world. This can't go on indefinitely without bad things happening to our country.
Well, that's the way I see it. I still ask this one simple question.
If our nation was able to develop into the nation it was in 1990 without doing what we've done since, why was it necessary to gut our manufacuring base on the alter of service sector jobs, outsourcing and the largest illegal immigration scandle in the history of our nation?
Presently we're approaching $800 billion in yearly trade deficit dollars. If that business was being conducted on U.S. soil, we'd have anywhere from $4 to $8 trillion in multiplier effect dollars pumped into our economy yearly.
Evidently we don't have 1000 communities that could use between $4 and $8 billion dollars pumped into their economies yearly.
What really cracks me up are the folks who claim that our market is doing great today as if that proves anything. What would it have been doing if we had pumped all this money into our own economy? Would there still be profits? Would wages have suffered? God forbid we consider the answers to those questions.