The Japanese have a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 150 percent, more than double the US level. They’re facing a demographic free fall, a shrinking population that is rapidly greying, which is putting a burden on their social services that their insufficiently numerous younger workers won’t be able to pay. Their economy still hadn’t entirely regained its vigor after the collapse of their own housing bubble in the 90s when they were hit with this newest crisis. Last I read, US productivity is about 20% greater than Japan per worker.
And you call that success compared to the US? Were you by any chance stuck in a cryogenic chamber in 1988, and were just recently released?
A reader of this thread could likely develop a more sophisticated understanding about the US banking system after playing the boardgame Monopoly.
And now you’re advocating that we repeat the mistake of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs that helped contribute to the Great Depression.
The damage of those tariffs has likely been overstated in the past–the primary problem of the Depression was the collapsing money supply–but there’s no controversy at all in professional circles that the tariffs contributed to the problem. Even very liberal economists fully acknowledge the importance of trade.
are those graphs “value added” or “total sales”? You do realize that American manufacturing (including defense related one) is heavily dependent on imported components and the price of those components ends up written into the sales stats, right?
Besides, note that even “value added” stats can be meaningless if sales are done through a corrupt, non-competitive process. When Chinese sell a computer for $300, that’s pretty obviously $300 of value. If it could be made and sold for cheaper, you will probably find a company that will do that. Now, when an American outfit sells $100M worth of military hardware to the Pentagon, how much of that money actually represents manufacturing work? How much represents the exorbitant salaries of lobbyists, managers, lawyers and “compliance specialists”? If Washington borrows $100 trillions and spends it all on a single American manufactured toilet seat for Air Force 1, would that mean that total American manufacturing has just produced $100 trillion worth of “value added”? More likely it would mean that lots of money was stolen and/or wasted and the statistics are not worth the paper they are written on, except for propaganda purposes.
In fact, core manufacturing skills are always in demand. If you’re a skilled, certified welder, there will always be jobs for you; even in bad times, fabricators often complain that there aren’t enough good welders around. If you’re a skilled machinist who knows his way around a modern CNC, there will always be work for you to do. Hell, there’s almost always demand for truck drivers, in case you’d rather drive stuff around than make it.
I don’t want to sound mean, but a lot of the folks who lose their jobs at GM and Chrysler, to pick on those companies, don’t actually have any transferable skills. They’re skilled at working on the GM or Chrysler assembly lines. If you’re a ticketed welder in mild, stainless and aluminum, you can work for anyone who needs welding of steel or aluminum, and there’s a zillion places where that skill is needed. If what you know is unique to a GM plant, you’re of no use anywhere else.
Most of the food you eat, and most of the packaging that it comes in, and the dies and cutting tools that made the packaging, is made in the USA. Almost all carpeting and flooring used in the USA is made there. The house itself, obviously, as well as every building you see and most of the components that make it. Most of the cars on the road, including a pretty good percentage of the “Foreign” models. Most of the books you own, most of the software that your computer runs, and most of the drugs and beer and booze that make you feel so good as you read your books and play your video games (or is that just me?) Most of the electricity that powers your house is purely American in origin.
Additionally, a great many of the things you have that are imported are made with American production machinery, planned out on American software, and shipped over to the USA by American couriers flying American airplanes.
And you are handwaving away stats, figures and expert oppinion based on no evidence other than it doesn’t coincide with your world view.
I’m not sure what you expect to happen. The United States should adopt an isolationist policy so that American workers and American businesses don’t have to compete with other countries?
I’ll grant that this could happen, but what evidence that it is occurring? Military equipment makes up only about 8 percent of durable good manufacturing – far from enough for this to influence the value-added calculation much.