That's a lot .. to explain widgets are made cheaper in China than the US.
We jump for joy and anticipation by the announcement ... not the fact, but the announcement of maybe a widget factory will look into our community to build a factory that will put 250 people to work.
In a town of thousands or a city of tens/hundreds of thousands, eleventeen times more applications are initiated than can possibly be accepted.
THAT'S the psycological and physical state of our nation.
I grew up in the Boston area and NEVER had to look hard for a job and almost always walked in on a Thursday or Friday and started Monday.
After school, part time or full time .. it was all available.
Now, as an adult, and more aware .. I can understand that where I lived was (though I lived in a 'burb) bustling with manufacturing type work.
The key to a successful American economy is .. IMO .. manufacturing ... widgets, if you will ..
Build factories, not unions or political parties.
******The worldwide experiment of using an exponential rise in debt driven by Governments and their Central Banks to hide the lack of jobs that produce real goods is beginning to fail******
Automation and computerization have severely reduced the number of men needed to produced steel, washing machines and injection mold plastics etc. In the case of America we had evil free trade polices that accelerated this decline in "guys jobs". It made Japan and China richer and us poorer and now Asia leads in many technological areas that feed into production of high tech items. American big corporations and big capital got wealthier from free trade as US workers got poorer. WalMart became larger (in income) than General Motors 17 years ago. WalMart showed you could make more money selling foreign and some domestic items than producing them which is what we used to be known for and what sustains a middle class.. The real estate bubble (ginned up by Greenspan/Federal Reserve easy money policies) temporarily created millions of good paying guys jobs. So many guy jobs we had a few hundred thousands illegal aliens guys also hammering nails.
There is nothing good after this "new normal" so do not lie to yourselves. There will be no automobile making revolution to supplant the obsolete (cliched) buggy whip manufacturers and make America more prosperous. There will be armies of non-producers (welfare state takers) who will look to the state for sustenance and who will vote for the Obamas who will provide this. Capital and wealth will become more concentrated because a fair and decent wealth distribution depends on a morally solid and prosperous middle class that only gets this way by making useful real tangible goods for a real world not a phony world of paper assets, and hyper-fiatized Federal Reserve issued money . You gotta mine it, make it or grow it. Computerization, automation , free trade kill this.
I despise the cultural left, capitalism is the best economic system, but we have large contradictions in it right now