Have you ever watched a football game or a basketball game where one team dominates the other team so badly that calling it a "blowout" would be a huge understatement?  Well, that is what China is doing to the United States.  China is absolutely destroying America on the global economic stage.  Once upon a time, the Chinese economy was a joke and the U.S. economy was the most powerful the world had ever seen.  But over the past couple of decades the U.S. economy has decayed and declined while the Chinese economy has skyrocketed.  Today, China makes more steel, more automobiles, more beer, more cotton, more coal and more solar panels than we do.  China has the fastest train in the world, the fastest computer in the world and they export twice as much high-tech equipment as we do.  In 2011, our trade deficit with China was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world, and China has now accumulated more than 3 trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves.  Every single day, we lose more jobs, more businesses and more of our national wealth to China.  In technical economic terms, China has "taken us out behind the woodshed" and has beaten the living daylights out of us.  Unfortunately, most Americans are so addicted to entertainment that they don't even realize what is happening. (Read More....)

Have you ever heard of the dodo bird?  Once upon a time, dodo birds lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.  But if you go there today you won't find any because they are extinct.  Well, if you are a blue collar worker in America today it looks like you are headed for a similar fate.  Blue collar workers are truly becoming an "endangered species" in the United States.  In the old days, the balance of power between business owners and labor was more even because they both needed each other.  But today that has all changed.  Thanks to robotics, automation and computers there is simply not as much of a need for physical laborers anymore and nothing is going to reverse that trend.  Big employers will continue to look for ways to replace men with machines, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But there is another major trend that is also destroying blue collar jobs in America that we should do something about.  Right now, it is perfectly legal for big corporations to shut down manufacturing facilities in the United States and send the jobs over to nations on the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay slave labor wages and where there are barely any regulations.  As you will see later on this article, this has been the biggest reason for the shocking blue collar job losses in America over the past decade.  The big corporations don't care that you need to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for your families.  All they care about it the bottom line, and if dramatic changes are not made soon, the number of blue collar jobs leaving the United States will continue to increase. (Read More....)

Did you know that we buy about a half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us?  The U.S. balance of trade is not only mind-blowingly bad - it is the worst in the world.  It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.  That would be an increase of more than 11 percent from last year.  As I have written about previously, the United States is the worst in the world at a lot of things, but as far as the economic well-being of our nation is concerned, our balance of trade is particularly important.  Every single month, far more money goes out of this country than comes into it.  Tax revenues are significantly reduced as all of this money gets sucked out of our communities.  The federal government, state governments and local governments borrow gigantic piles of money to try to make up the difference, but all of this borrowing just makes our debt problems a whole lot worse.  In the end, no amount of government debt is going to be able to cover over the fact that our national economic pie is shrinking.  We are continually consuming far more wealth than we produce, and that is a recipe for economic disaster. (Read More....)

Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year?  As World War II ended, the United States emerged as the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen.  But now America's industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned.  Yes, we will always need trading relationships that are fair and balanced with other countries that have economic systems that are similar to our own.  However, the truth is that most of our trading relationships are neither "fair" nor balanced.  For example, China manipulates currency rates so that Chinese products are much cheaper than they should be, they brazenly steal our technology and we let them get away with it, they deeply subsidize their most important industries and they exploit their citizens by allowing them to be paid slave labor wages.  How in the world does that resemble the "free market" at work?  Predatory nations such as China do everything that they can to distort the free market.  So why in the world would any rational economist ever recommend that we should keep trading with other countries that are cheating us blind?  After you read the facts in this article about the gutting of America's industrial might, hopefully you will get very angry.  We need the American people to start getting very upset about these very important issues. (Read More....)

It is absolutely amazing how many Americans are still convinced that more "free trade" is the answer to our economic problems.  The truth is that there is a vast difference between "free trade" and "fair trade", and in this article I will prove that all true conservatives and all true liberals should be completely against the insane trade policies of the federal government.  Yes, we will always need to trade with other nations.  Other nations make or have things that we need to trade for.  Balanced trade relationships with other nations that have similar economies and that share similar values can be very beneficial.  For example, our trading relationship with Canada, though not perfect, is generally beneficial to both sides.  However, the United States also has dozens of trading relationships that are highly destructive to the U.S. economy.  There are some predatory nations that are blatantly and openly cheating and everyone can see it.  They are getting away with bloody murder and they are robbing us blind.  The United States of America is being taken advantage of, and as a result thousands of good businesses are being destroyed and millions of good jobs are being lost.  If you are an American and you are in favor of all of the unfair trade that is currently going on, then either you don't know much about economics or you actually want to see the U.S. economy be destroyed. (Read More....)

The United States is negotiating one of the biggest free trade agreements in history and there is barely a peep about it on the news.  Years ago, Ross Perot warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a "giant sucking sound" as millions of jobs left this country.  It turns out that he was right.  Starting on Tuesday, the next round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (also known as the "NAFTA of the Pacific") will begin in Chicago.  We have already seen the Obama administration push hard for free trade agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia and the administration is making the Trans-Pacific Partnership a very high priority.  Membership in the "NAFTA of the Pacific" already includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.  The United States, Australia, Peru, Malaysia and Vietnam are scheduled to join.  Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly considering membership.  So once this "free trade" agreement is ratified, will we hear another "giant sucking sound" as millions more of our jobs are shipped overseas? (Read More....)

Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama's highly touted "Jobs Council", is moving even more GE infrastructure to China.  GE makes more medical-imaging machines than anyone else in the world, and now GE has announced that it "is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing".  Apparently, this is all part of a "plan to invest about $2 billion across China" over the next few years.  But moving core pieces of its business overseas is nothing new for GE.  Under Immelt, GE has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States.  Perhaps GE should change its slogan to "Imagination At Work (In China)".  If the very people that have been entrusted with solving the unemployment crisis are shipping jobs out of the country, what hope is there that things are going to turn around any time soon? (Read More....)

Once upon a time in America, virtually anyone with a high school education and the willingness to work hard could get a good job.  Fifty years ago a "good job" would enable someone to own a home, buy a car, take a couple of vacations a year and retire with a decent pension.  Unfortunately, those days are long gone.  Every single year the number of "good jobs" in the United States actually shrinks even as our population continues to grow.  Where in the world did all of those good jobs go?  Economists toss around terms such as "outsourcing" and "offshoring" to describe what is happening, but most ordinary Americans don't really grasp what those terms mean.  So what is outsourcing?  Well, it essentially means sending work somewhere else.  In the context of this article I will be using those terms to describe the thousands of manufacturing facilities and the millions of jobs that have been sent overseas.  Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy has become increasingly merged into the emerging "one world economy".  Thanks to the WTO, NAFTA and a whole host of other "free trade" agreements, the internationalist dream of a truly "global marketplace" is closer than ever before. (Read More....)

Any economy that constantly consumes far more wealth than it produces is eventually going to be in for a very hard fall.  Many point to relatively stable GDP numbers as evidence that the U.S. economy is doing okay, but the truth is that we have had to borrow increasingly massive amounts of money to keep GDP numbers up at that level.  The U.S. government is going to run an all-time record deficit of about 1.65 trillion dollars this year and average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income.  But borrowing endless amounts of money and consuming massive amounts of wealth with that borrowed money is a road that leads to economic oblivion.  The only way to have a healthy economy in the long run is to create wealth.  But how can America create wealth if our industrial base is being absolutely destroyed?  According to Forbes, the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.  Hundreds of formerly thriving industries in the United States are being totally wiped out.  China uses every trick in the book to win trade battles.  They deeply subsidize their domestic industries, they openly steal technology, they blatantly manipulate currency rates and they allow their citizens to be paid slave labor wages.  So yes, the products coming from China are cheaper, but in the process tens of thousands of factories in the U.S. are shutting down, millions of jobs are being lost and the ability of America to create wealth is being compromised. (Read More....)

From now on, whenever you hear the term "the global economy" you should immediately equate it with the destruction of the U.S. middle class.  Over the past several decades, the American economy has been slowly but surely merged into the emerging one world economic system.  Unfortunately for the middle class, much of the rest of the world does not have the same minimum wage laws and worker protections that we do.  Therefore, the massive global corporations that now dominate our economy are able to pay workers in other countries slave labor wages and import the products that they make into the United States to compete with products made by "expensive" American workers.  This has resulted in a mass exodus of manufacturing facilities and jobs from the United States. (Read More....)