It makes the world’s savers reluctant to be exposed to the U.S. dollar.Posted on 10/05/2009 4:25:24 AM PDT by expat_panama
The United States has been hollowed out. It no longer manufactures goods. Once the factory of the world, the U.S. now manufactures debt. The high wage manufacturing jobs have been out-sourced to low wage economies. The demise of U.S. manufacturing is at the core of the decline of America, its chronic trade deficits and growing international indebtedness. It makes the world’s savers reluctant to be exposed to the U.S. dollar.
There is one problem with this widely held view: It is factually wrong.
The value of U.S. manufacturing output in real terms (adjusted for inflation) was a little more than $3 trillion in 2008. That is up from $1.2 trillion in 1972. If the U.S. manufacturing sector was a separate country, it would be the world’s 5th largest economy (behind the rest of the U.S., Japan, China and Germany). The U.S. remains the world’s largest manufacturer. Full stop.
Although international comparisons are fraught with measuring problems, it appears that the U.S. share of world manufacturing is roughly the same as the combined total of the BRICs (Brazil, India and Russia account for a combined 11-12% share).
The data also suggests that the impressive rise of Chinese manufacturing has come at the expense of Japan and other East Asian countries more than the United States, which the UN data suggests actually saw a small rise of its global share in recent years.
China has largely injected itself into the production chain at the labor intensive stages, so that television or electronic good that may have been made in Japan or Taiwan or South Korea now says made in China.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
If you're talking about union workers though, they generally have been grossly overpaid for years.
Sure they bought plenty, but they drove their sources of income out of business. You know that. They are in a situation of their own making, and I'm not keen on paying extra to subsidize them.
The economy was much better off when they still had purchasing power.
All I can say is.....America's chickens have come home to roost!!!
Nope...that was the point of this article. It hasn't cut manufacturing jobs. Productivity is the big mover behind fewer manufacturing jobs.
Manufacturing has shifted yes, unions killed our smokestack industries, but overall manufacturing has remained strong in dollar amounts, units produced, and as a % of GDP.
Manufacturing could have increased with a cheaper dollar, lower taxes, more workforce, and less regulations, but we manufacture as much stuff as we ever have with less people.
Thanks for the debate, but I can't make my position any more clear, and I believe I've shown you the facts that back me up.
Is that why we ran a $268,000,000,000 trade deficit with China last year, cuz of all our increased domestic output?
No discussion about union workers earning too much money would be complete without a comment about the ridiculous salaries and bonues handed out to the worthless incompetent management types that ran their business into the ground. As always in America, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Walter (Jeff Dunham): “Welcome to wal-mart get ur shit and get out.”
I can believe you're not sure. The discussion was about whether or not the scant data presented in the lead article for this thread supports the conclusions the author presents.
Over several decades we've had a growing trade deficit with increased manufacturing output. Since O gets elected we get tariff hikes, 5 million people loosing their jobs, and the trade deficit's dropped by half.
Certainly, management decisions hurt many of the large manufacturers and I’m no fan of outrageous executive pay...but...what put Chrysler and GM out of business were high wages and crushing legacy costs for healthcare and pensions.
That is the unions’ fault, and ultimately the union member’s.
Prove it.
Workers who wanted more than a buck an hour and people who didn't want to live downstream from factories that dumped untreated waste into the river "killed" our manufacturing.
C'mon...that's just socialist boilerplate.
I still remain unconvinced any proponent of outsourcing to slave labor markets would work at a Chinese factory. Or live anywhere near one.
That is simply your opinion. People of all politics sweated in sewing halls and mills around here, and not that long ago. In fact, people flocked to those mills regardless of how harsh working conditions were. The pay sucked too.
I thought it was more along the lines of "the author provides scant data that doesn't support his conclusion, and I'm providing no data myself to prove it."
You persist with your usual nonsense, inane one-liners which provide nothing but sweeping generalities and no meaningful discussion.
So don't get touchy when I point out that your dispute with this author contains the sweeping generalities and meaningless discussion you find so "offensive."
Think about it, what do you do? Someone presents data, and "it's not good enough." Someone else turns the discussion toward the abstract, and "it's a sweeping generality." Why don't you post some data yourself so you can get a dose of your own medicine?
People say the US doesn't make anything anymore. The article showed historical industrial production in constant dollars increasing over decades, and also showed the share of world output up from 12 years ago. If you still say America has no manufacturing and won't back it up, then the impression is that you have convictions so solid that any data presented will always be called 'scant' no matter what.
Lol, show me where I said America has no manufacturing. I said the data presented does not support the conclusions the author of the article claims, and that the stats generated with nothing but totals tell us very little.
It's amazing how many people just read something, then erect their own straw man claim about what they say someone said (which they didn't say), then demand they defend it.
Will88 Lol, show me where I said America has no manufacturing
If I said "Lol, show me where I said you said America has no manufacturing" you might counter with "Lol, show me where I said you said I said America has no manufacturing" and that gets boring so let's get back to the data -'scant' or otherwise. The article presented data, more data got posted. Hard numbers from you would be useful.
Total garbage....
Sure our manufacturing is up from 20 years ago
But it obviously is not enough and not making the right items otherwise we would not be importing so much from China/Asia. Plus tariffs would be a great idea to keep out certain items to protect our manufacturing base
Asian imports plus energy imports have helped ruin the US dollar. We ran up outlandish trade deficits each year due to the Dollars status as the world’s premier reserve currency and the world isn’t going to lend us all that $$$ anymore
I’m amazed how the “free traitor” crowd here still doesn’t connect the dots between borrowing trillions from Chinese and others to buy foreign stuff is unsustainable and hurts the US dollar and our standard of living. How this unsustainability is proven each day like to day as gold and Australian dollar soar same as they did yesterday
Care to trade Will88 for dennisw?
I guess maybe I’m not fully understanding your logic here. If I might ask, what argument are you making here?
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