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America is the richest and most powerful nation in the history of nations. With tremendous wealth, comes great regret over our sins. We pass laws to prohibit most sins we can think of. Most laws and regulations are well intended. The cumulative effect is to cause traditional manufacturing to be much less expensive abroad.
This isn't necessarily bad, we like many of our workplace and environmental rules. However when we establish treaties with other nations regarding trade, our cultural beliefs are often not incorporated into them. As such a country that pays workers less, or pollutes more for lower priced power, has an economic advantage. This coupled with container shipping, has made global trade very profitable.
On the bright side, nearly half our trade imbalance has been due to fossil fuel imports, and it is likely fossil fuel exports could become a trade surplus for us at a future time. Similarly, we are very productive as an agricultural nation. Where we fail is in manufacturing.
In the new century, with the culture and technology we have and like, the number of workers to start and create a multi billion dollar company is much less than it used to be. As such many find gainful employment difficult.
The biggest corporations are now not American at all but globalist. We are bankrupt -- our debt is unpayable at this point and fewer than half of Americans are paying federal taxes.
Our population growth rate matches those of the third world but most of our population growth is through imported poverty.
Many American businesses are very competitive. American finance, software, movies, agriculture, airplanes are the best in the world. No country is the best at everything. Some of our manufacturing isn't so hot, like Detroit car companies. But Honda exports cars from Marysville and Toyota from Georgetown.
We can't expect other countries to roll over, and they haven't. Germany reformed its labor laws and retirement system to become more competitive. China abandoned Communism. England and Canada have become more market-oriented. They're going to win some.
It's like the Yankees. They used to win all the time. Then other teams got better and they started winning. Sometimes. It isn't that the Yankees lost it all of a sudden. Other picked up their game.
Who is the comparison with? America is by far the largest economy in the world';larger than China; Germany and UK combined. Competitive is pretty individual now days which is the reason for the widening income thing.
Americans are living in the ending chapter of post 1960s culture and the beginning chapter of the decline of affluence. So far Americans want both an unrealistic moral standard, whose economic foundation has collapsed, and a high level of broad prosperity.
Americans don't know how to pick battles. We can't have it all. We won't. Too many Americans see the two parties and businesses turn their backs, and these Americans are still here trying to be nice citizens. Are we suckers or what. The middle class are the ones paying tax so the poor can have more children and then ask for more tax.
Americans should wake up now. We won't be able to sustain our social programs. We won't have the luxury or the mood for them. We won't be able to hold out jobs without upgrading our skills and learning something marketable. Individuals must become competitive and learn marketable skills.
Let go of the post 1960s culture. It's over people. If you don't help yourself, you'd see only people turning their backs and taking advantage. Let's see how long the liberal middle class can hold out and hold their temper.
In a way, it is a good thing that entrepreneurial immigrants come here. They are resetting a culture of work ethic than complacency and privilege. They should teach Americans how to win (and lose) in this economy. Let the guilted, politically correct and internally conflicted middle class Americans learn to chart their waters in the new America.
Pffft.
Or, maybe Americans aren't "competitive" because corporations can't pay us a few bucks a day, keep us penned up in caged-in apartments above the factories (Foxconn), and actually (sometimes) get in trouble when they simply pour pollution into the air and water.
It doesn't matter a bit how many skills you have if some corporate toad can hire 4 or 5 far less skilled peopled at about the same total wage. It matters even less these days since people are so used to poor quality that even if those 4 or 5 slave-wage workers together can't equal a single 1st world worker, it won't matter since big business will still make a profit.
Also, all the evidence strongly supports the fact that US workers are among the world's most productive:
Sure, that may not apply to every individual, but overall, this nation's labor problems are not caused by a lack of education, skills, or whatever, but by exploitation of far cheaper labor overseas or through illegals or visa workers. Top that off with a total lack of workplace safety laws, pollution control, and so on in 3rd world nations, and it is easy to see that it is all about the money. Sure we COULD compete with that... if you don't mind living in a shack, breathing toxic air, and working for a bowl of rice so somebody far away can buy a second mansion.
I always love the overt simplicity in these opined views of "America's competitiveness". First off, there is little empirical data to support that claim of lack of competitiveness on the part of America's workers, it's mostly a straw-man argument designed to serve as the last word on just how bad we American's are when compared to those hopeless souls who toil on the modern plantations of Indonesia, Viet Nam, Africa, China, India and a host of other "nations", and I use that word partly in jest because these are simply oligarchies of the controlling class in those regions.
No we are not going to tolerate a revisionist take on why globalism isn't serving OUR needs. Sure it's a great thing for those who benefit from it but that's not to say there is widespread support for it from America's working class. We have what appears to be permanently economically marginalized populace in the US who can't find jobs that would sustain a person who then would be considered a contributive member of society. If we support a poverty wage policy like those nations that we hear are "prospering" then those who are for it must work for those wages or be called out as flat out hypocrites for advocating such a construct for others.
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