Honestly, nothing good is made in America right now. Well, at least not much. We are great at providing services, but we are losing elsewhere. We live in a global economy where only those who offer the best quality at the most competitive price will survive. The best cars and electronics are all foreign. For example, i'd love to buy am American car, but they are all junk with recalls out the wazoo while foreign companies like Honda, Subaru and Toyota have a track record of quality and value for your dollar. They don't build crap like gas guzzlers and 5 of the same cars re-badged. You didn't see any foreign auto makers crying to their home countries or the US for a bailout in this economy. That's why I refuse to buy GM. Ever. Wake up GM (Government Motors), ford and Chrysler!

Actually, wake up America! Stop outsourcing and putting huge profit over your workers! You can still be competitive and make a profit without shipping jobs to India.

Shame on us. We sat back, happily buying low cost products made offshore, while American workers lost their jobs. We sent the best minds available to teach foreign manufacturers how to become more efficient.
The blame is widespread. Sure, the greedy capitalists were lining their pockets. Sure, the unions were demanding more for less. Sure, the average consumer simply wanted the lowest possible price.
We have now reaped the results of the years of ignorance. We have unemployment at 10%. We have a bankrupt economy. We have a society ever more reliant on government handouts. We have an education system churning out sub standard results.
There is no simple, easy solution. We need to accept the fact that the American work ethic which made this country great--needs a revival. Let's start by ending the blame game. We ALL had a hand in this.

UNIONS

We've been lulled to sleep with "fake" signs of our economy :

The DOW is not a good barometer for how things are going as it used to be the Dow Jones Industrials. At that time steel and other manufactures made up the DOW but is now made up of a financial companies, computer companies and other non-manufacturing entities.

But all you hear is the DOW is up...Dow is down.

The financial portion of GDP has quadrupled since 1940 and is largely disconnected from the well-being of most americans.

Unions have taken a hit far beyond any rational level as being responsible for off-shoring.

In the case of autos, union workers don't design the ugly cars or decide which ones get built, unions don;t price the cars or decide where the raw materials come from; unions don't decide the length of warranties, etc.

I for one do not want to driving down the road at 70-80 miles an hour in something made by folks making slightly above minimum wage. Do you ?

Wages have been stagnant for decades while the costs of everything else has skyrocketed, crushing average american families.

Most of the stuff we buy today and made overseas is cheap but it's junk and doesn't last nearly as long as things used to...cheap comes with a price.

This is what happens when the "private sector" a.k.a. "corporate greed" is allowed free reign in the name of profits.

Your right, boldart. We should just nationalize all large corporations and industries and direct their enterprises for what is in the best interest of the nation. Or if not flat-out nationalization, we can just regulate them to the point that they're no more than puppets on a string.

As a solitary twig, we break. But bundled & lashed together, we are unbreakable...

"UNIONS " Typical myreply reply. Blame the workers.Why does myreply hate Americans?

*t isn't union members, its union leadership. There's a big difference.

Call me crazy, but when the AFL-CIO chooses for its slogan the words engraved on Karl Marx's tombstone, I don't really have a friendly disposition toward them.

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!

Actually, no Centinel. We need to study the history of what made us a great industrial power, with well-compensated jobs for the majority of Americans. The answer, quite simply, was protective tariffs. Once we started on this "free trad" jag, our industrial base, which won, essentially, WWi, WWI, and the cold war, began to erode at an ever increasing rate. Without it, our economy consists of millions of people trading worthless paper, and building their houses with poisonous Chinese drywall.

While we still have some economic pull as a consumer nation, we need to place conditions on imports that make it advantageous to manufacture here. As the original article pointed out, this can be done while having a well-compensated workforce, as has been done in Germany.

It's better not to knee-jerk about "nationalization" and "government over-regulation". The task of government is to look out for the interests of citizens. If that involves reining in corporations that are draining the lifeblood of the economy, so be it.

Do you want America, the longest-lived, most powerful democracy in history to survive? Or is letting business types run amok more important to you?

What a wonderful use of providing false choices for a complex dilemma. I either love America & 'democracy', or I love being the shill of corporate elites.

You say that tariffs made the country great, and I want you to provide empirical evidence that supports that conclusion. I don't like tariffs because I don't believe in mercantile economics, because they don't work. Local example: steel tariffs and import quotas didn't save the steel belt.

"The task of government is to look out for the interests of citizens."

then try to rationalize Obamacare Regis. the overwhelming major did not want (nor still does not want) this, yes the ruling elite jammed this up our rear, thinking "we're too stupid to know whats good for us". the tea party started out on taxes (fyi, tea stands for Taxed Enough Already), but Obamacare got it going full steam. enough of this leftist revisionism of history. the feds were at one point there to provide for the common defense and to regulate interstate commerce (so one state wouldn't take advantage of another). Wilson, being the first "progressive" president really started us down this path, FDR expanded it, LBJ, Carter, and Clinton chipped away, but this one has taken C4 to the structure and is attempting to blow it up at once. enough is enough.

"Do you want America, the longest-lived, most powerful democracy in history to survive? Or is letting know it all leftist politicians run amok more important to you? ?

fixed that part for you Regis

But lets just look at steel tariffs...

Impose an artificially high price on foreign steel, to make it less competitive in the country, so that domestic steel can raise its prices.

It raises its prices due to an artificial demand for higher wages, either through unions or through government (but usually a combination thereof). The workers benefit, but net profit remains the same for the industry overall. All you've done is set a price floor.

But who pays for the increased price of labor? You never seem to get around to that end of the question. We do, either through subsidy or through price.

What does a higher price in steel mean? It means a few things. It means a lower demand for steel, manufacturers will use less steel and seek cheaper alternative alloys, the market will react.

So because of higher steel prices, manufacturers buy less steel. In a free market, decrease in demand & labor must correspond to a decrease in wages for labor. But in your world, demand goes down, cost of labor goes up. So what happens, companies start to go under. Shareholders receive less dividends, plants begin to close, workers get laid off. The steel industry shrinks in size to meet the new (lesser) demand for steel. It MUST contract in size to pay the increased wages at new decreased demand.

Or, if they absolutely need the steel, they'll increase the price of their end product to the consumer. So the price of the steel widget increases to pay for the increased price of steel to pay for the increased wage of the steel worker.

So the consumer does one of two things: he buys less steel widgets, or if he has to buy steel widgets, a greater percentage of his income must be dedicated to it. The effect of this must be less income to buy other products from other industries. Or, like the steel workers, they use the force of government & unions to demand an increase in their own wages - and the cycle repeats itself.

Think through the whole equation. It doesn't end with "and the workers got their fair share and lived happily ever after." It ends with "and a lot of workers got laid off anyways and ended up on unemployment." There are winners & losers in the free market, but there are more losers in the mercantile market. It isn't a zero-sum game. We tried tariffs & wage-setting during the Depression, and it didn't bring jobs rushing back state-side.

Germany fared better than we have during this recession, but saying its because of tariffs and subsidy ignores a lot of other economic factors, and it only looks at a small snap-shot of the economic landscape. I could just as easily say that the Germans are doing better because they drink lots of beer - it requires the same burden of proof that you provide. Germany may be doing well, but there are plenty of other countries with more controlled economies than ours that aren't. Why don't we look at Hong Kong as an example, they're more free market than we are and are doing better.

Cut corporate taxes and they will invest those dollars in plants and manufacturing, ergo jobs.

Reduce the tax rate for the wealthiest and they will invest those dollars creating jobs.

The trickle down theory has always seemed sound, but in reality it has always been mostly a myth.

Corporations continue to outsource jobs and the wealthy still shelter their dollars in off shore accounts.

They outsource because their capital is treated better in other markets, and people move their wealth outside the country because it protects more of their earnings.

If you want jobs to come back and investment to come back, stop seeking punitive economic policies. You don't seek to create incentive to create jobs, you seek to punish capital for doing what capital naturally does, flow in the path of least resistance, like water. Show me where a job has been taxed into existence.

You want to see capital (not just money, understand what capital is and the difference between the two) come back home, don't tax income, which is where capital comes from.

You get p****d when a buisness raises prices or cuts jobs, but you can't see the forest through the trees and realize that when you raise a tax, a buisness must & will collect the tax from the consumer or from reducing labor. When you get a warm & fuzzy from a politician raising taxes on those evil corporations, you don't get that they're taxing you, because that's where the money to pay the tax comes from.

Trickle down isn't a "theory", its an economic reality, and your "feelings" don't negate the natural laws of economics. And guess what, "trickle down" applies to taxes too, when you tax a buisness, the tax trickles down to the consumer, because the consumer is the origin of all profit, capital, and tax revenue.

And if you want an example of an industry hurt in part by buying those steel widgets and the cycle that the process creates, look no further than the American auto industry.

You like to mock capitalist economic theory as too simplistic, but what do you offer that hasn't been tried? Every single solution you offer is some form of taxation on someone you see as the "bad guy." Whether its a tax on buisness income (that's working real great for PA, by the way... lots of jobs here...), a tax on investment, a tax on production, a tax on importation, a tax on individual, a subsidy paid for through taxation, etc ad nauseum - every economic woe should can be fixed by some form of taxation and regulation.

But you never complete the thought, you don't look at the second and third order consequences, you don't understand the unintended consequences, and you don't realize that you cannot foresee and control the infinite moving parts of market forces. And when those unforeseen negative consequences become reality, your answer is the same solution that created the problem - more taxation and regulation. It may be feel-good economics, but its as smart as shooting yourself in the foot to scratch your toe.

Boffyflow--"Blame the workers. Why does myreply hate Americans?"

Myreply didn't say "workers", he said "Unions". And he didn't say "Americans", he said "Unions". Unions and workers are not the same thing. Unions and Americans are not the same thing. He didn't blame the workers. And he doesn't hate Americans I'm sure.

My biggest problems with unions are 1) that they think all work is "their work", and that any non-union member who agrees to do it is "stealing" it, and 2) they defend the members of their unions who don't do their jobs properly. Additionally, a lot of union guys who complain about non-union workers "stealing" their work don't seem to have a problem paying a non-union guy $12/hr to replace his own roof. Trust me, I know a lot of union guys and they do it all the time.

So.....centinel, explain why after multiple tax cuts for the wealthiest americans and corporations the 2000's were the worst decade of job creation ?

data here

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics...on-record/


Tax policy existed for decades whereby the wealthy and corporations paid their share of taxes but that policy is broken.

For example taxes on dividends and capital gains was always higher than the tax on wages (working people)to encourage people to work.

Instead they've allowed non-wage income to be at lower rates thereby enriching those getting the majority of their "income" by sitting on their rears.

Back when the top marginal rates were higher, corporations would rather give employees raises and invest in equipment rather than pay higher taxes.

Suggesting that every cent of taxes paid by corporations simply is tranferred to the price of goods is folly. The market decides the price of goods...raise you price too high....nobody buys it or buys it from a competitor.

Fact is 2/3rds of corporations paid no federal taxes

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that 95 percent of corporations paid less than 5 percent of their income in taxes, and 6 in 10 paid nothing at all in federal taxes from 1996 through to 2000.

The corporate share of taxes paid fell from 33 percent in the 1940's to 15 percent in the 1990's.

The individual's share of taxes has risen from 44 to 73 percent.

Data from the OECD show that in the average member country corporate taxes are equal to about 3.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, corporate taxes have generally been between and 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP over the last two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Table F-4).

Most companies in US avoid federal income taxes

WASHINGTON - Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080812/ap_ ... income_tax

So...centinel, how has that helped america other than to enrich a few ? Why were the 2000's the worst decade of job growth in our history ?

Why? Because the 2000's had three bad recessions. You had the .com bubble at the turn of the millennium, the post-9/11 recession, and the housing-bubble burst in 2008. On top of that, you had two wars that involved a lot of spending, which turned into record deficits, which create further economic uncertainty. If there's one thing that is poison to a market, its uncertainty, and the 2000's were nothing but that.

And I think its good that 2/3 of corporations pay no income taxes. I think it should be 0/3. Why do you think you hear those "incorporate in Nevada" commercials on the radio? While we're at it, lets get rid of all taxes on income, individual and corporate. Let's go for a consumption tax, since the consumer is where all taxes end up anyways.

By the way, Centinel, supply-side is a myth and has not in fact worked nor been proven.

Reagan cut tax rates but gov't debt tripled under him even after he raised taxes 7 times. Republican offer nothing but tax cuts as econ policy and yet as stated above the 2000's was the worst decade of job creation in US history

Here's a little about David Stockman Reagan's budget director

He admitted that the 1981 tax cut "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top [tax] rate" for the wealthy.

Cutting taxes for the rich had long ago been coined "trickle down economics" - and it was an unpopular concept with the middle class. "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,'" Stockman told the interviewer.

"So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."7

The Rosy Scenario failed to materialize. The economy did not grow out of its deficits.

In 1986, Washington and the rest of the nation would again be surprised when Stockman confessed all in a book entitled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.

It's a lie that republicans repeat daily

Consumption taxes are regressive and would lead to larger deficits and crush lower & middle class americans who spend the majority of their income on necessities.

Again, please, other than excuse after excuse, explain the failure of multiple tax cuts resulted in the worst job creation numbers in our history ?

Spare me the uncertainly talk...welcome to the free market where there is no certainty. Also you may be surprised to know that the period of the highest growth in the US was a time of our highest tax rates.

Myth? Have you ever read Wealth of Nations?

And I just told you why, it isn't my problem if you don't like what reality is. Why don't you explain to me that in the face of tax cuts, the federal government had record tax revenues?

The reason you had deficits under Reagan was because he spent the decade rebuilding the American military, and because he had to compromise with a Democratically controlled Congress. To get the tax-cuts he wanted, he had to sign onto other spending measures. That's how politics works. But I'm no fan of deficit spending no matter who is in office, so that little talking point of yours isn't going to work on me.

And as far as consumption taxation, people like you don't seem to have a problem with it when it comes to things like gasoline, so don't feed me that "hurts the poor" line. The Fair Tax would give a prebate to every American for what they would be taxed on necessities based on what the calculated poverty rate is. So wrong again.

The fair Tax is right wing fantasy and will never be enacted because it doesn't work.

If the solution to america's ill is to simply cut taxes who wouldn't do that ? They'd be heroes

I encourage you to read David Stockman recent piece and as I showed you above, he admitted that supply side/trickle down was "a trojan horse"

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
By DAVID STOCKMAN
Published: July 31, 2010

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion.

That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08...ckman.html

Your Reagan example of how spending increased is fantasy for 2 reasons: One the President submits the budget and two with a republican majority Bush/Cheney doubled the national debt.

The difference has been republicans always pushing tax cut fantasies. THAT has been the difference in our large debt under republicans.

They always talk about small gov't yet is always gets larger under republicans. Clinton actually reduced gov't by over 300,000 jobs.

I read it, and I think you're a s*****k for eating that tripe.

But it doesn't matter what I think anyways, you're getting what you want out of government. More regulation, bailouts, a union-friendly administration, and expiring tax cuts.

By your prescription, we should be well on the road to recovery. All you have to do is wait for the actual results so you can rub it in my face, but I won't hold my breath on that.

I wasn't using profanity, I don't know why that's censored...

Reagan only cut taxes once but raised them 7 times so the bogus "had to work with dems to cut taxes" is fantasy. Only problem is that most of the tax increases hit working families

I repeat : Reagan raised taxes 7 times including doubling the social security withholding that everyone pays who makes less than 107K.

Bruce Bartlett, who worked for Reagan and in GHW Bush administrations wrote :

Reagan may have resisted calls for tax increases, but he ultimately supported them.

In 1982 alone, he signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year and the Highway Revenue Act raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.

In 1983, Reagan signed legislation raising the Social Security tax rate.

This is a tax increase that lives with us still, since it initiated automatic increases in the taxable wage base. As a consequence, those with moderately high earnings see their payroll taxes rise every single year.

In 1984, Reagan signed another big tax increase in the Deficit Reduction Act.

This raised taxes by $18 billion per year or 0.4 percent of GDP. A similar-sized tax increase today would be about $44 billion.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 raised taxes yet again.

Even the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was designed to be revenue-neutral, contained a net tax increase in its first 2 years.

And the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 raised taxes still more.

The year 1988 appears to be the only year of the Reagan presidency, other than the first, in which taxes were not raised legislatively. Of course, previous tax increases remained in effect. According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP.

This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today's economy.

Oh...and I just saw your comment above about record tax revenues.

Again, you buy the lines given to you.

Essentially, with the exception of recessions, every year is a "record" as taxes to the gov't normally go up.

Taxes declined for several years under Bush but finally started to rebound and go up.

It's kinda like if I have a full swimming pool and drain half the water (cut taxes) but each time it rains the pool water rises (economy grows)eventually the water level will go back to being full but not overflow which is what it would have done earlier had the pool not been drained.

But now that it's back to being full, I can claim RECORD tax revenues.

Ok, which one is it then. Either Reagan's tax cut (singular) wrecked the economy, or he never really cut taxes at all but raised them seven times. You can't harp that his tax cuts ruined the economy and then criticize him for raising taxes as a counter. If he raised taxes, then wouldn't you agree with what he did? And if you didn't like the way the 80's economy was, but agree that he raised taxes just as much if not more than he cut them, wouldn't you have to concede that the tax increases didn't do what you wish them to do now?

And I'm not "buying" anyone's numbers. I went onto the IRS website and looked at their published income tax revenues, then extrapolated the data directly to an Excel table, which showed the trend that I described earlier.

But like I said, we'll see who is right after 2010. When rates go up in 2011, you'll see a spike in revenue. What remains to be seen is if it invigorates the economy like you say it will. But whatever the increase in revenue is, I promise it will not cover the multi-year trillion dollar budget deficits we're incurring now and in the future.

I never said Reagan wrecked the economy only that he tripled the national debt.

I bring up the tax increases to rebut your argument that he was making deals continually with dems to cut taxes which he only did once.

While nobody is a fan of taxes, they simply aren't the magic tax fairy that cures our economic ills.

If you read the right tax tables you will see that after the 2001 & 2003 tax cuts, revenues declined, then went back up as they always do. See swimming pools example again.

One of the reasons you're seeing trillion dollar deficits is that WAR SPENDING IS ON BUDGET AFTER BEING OFF BUDGET UNDER BUSH.

Plus as I already said, the 2009 defict was annouced at 1.2 trillion before Obama was sworn into office.

Once you add TARP and other rescues to the economy, more war spending you have large deficits especially with tens of million unemployed (and not paying taxes)

The GOP has offered nothing to help other than their "magical tax cuts"

PLease do tell us how the economy will turn around and get these millions back to work ?

Where are the "right" charts. I pulled my info directly from government accounting sources. By "right" do you mean "skewed"?

As far as war debt being on the books now, I'll agree with you that it was voodoo economics to ever have it off the books. But how abouts you subtract those numbers from the rest of the federal budget, then tell me where the deficit stands for fiscal years 2009 and on.

First, please provide the link to your claim of increasing tax revenues

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=7731

Big Guy, you are the quintessential "ugly Aerican" when it comes to economics. The essense of your philosophy is "tax the s*^t out of anyone & everyone but me". Or as the old ditty says: Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax THAT fellow, behind the tree.

Cutting taxes will not solve our problems, nor will raising them. Any tax cuts must me targeted & specific, instead of being a broadside to buy votes from as many people as possible. Increased taxes must come with spending reductions of equal size.

You can say the government is different all you want, but reality belies your claim, and trumps it every time. Governments get out of debt just like individuals do; spend less, earn more, and use the additional income to pay down debt. It's just the way it is, y'all................

My goodness, we seem to have struck a nerve with the right-leaning contributors here.

Centianel-Yes, it is a stark choice between America's survival and unbridled capitalism. If you want empirical evidence, read the suavely-titled "Free Trade Doesn't Work" by Ian Fletcher.

It looks like the entire political class, and a lot of the citizenry, has been hypnotized by the free trade mantra. We have been in decline, as far as the average standard of living is concerned, since free trade started decades ago. We have lost our manufacturing base. We will not survive. It is not a false choice.

Doggy, as usual you waste your time trying to characterize your opponents' viewpoints, rather than sharing your thoughts on how to solve the problem at hand. How would YOU bring back our industrial base, aside from having our workers work for Chinese wages? How would your restore the vast middle class we had a few decades ago, which made us the greatest economic engine in history?

There are powerful interests that don't want to see any restrictions on business, and don't want us to believe businesses can actually hurt our society. And they have powerful voices in the media trying to brainwash us to that effect. Wake up.

I put an order in for the book on Amazon, it got good reviews and I have no problem reading something I probably won't agree with, as long as it's done tastefully.

I won't be able to read it until later in the year though, I go out of town tomorrow morning for about a month, and will be just as busy when I get back until around the Thanksgiving/Christmas time frame. But I will definitely sit down and read it.

And let me backtrack a bit, because we want the same thing. I'm for as free of a market as possible, but I recognize that for the sake of national security, that there are industries vital to the national interest. I believe in comparative advantage, but recognize that if your advantage is making cheap rubber dog crap and your enemy's advantage is making steel girders, that there's a problem. In that cases, then yes, there may be a state interest in supporting a struggling sector because of its nessecity to national security - things like steel, aerospace, etc.

Where we differ is how to attract & retain that industry. I would rather we create an environment where those industries naturally flourish, profit, create jobs, and contribute to the national interest by their very existence.

What I don't want is perpetual tax-payer funding of failed buisness models with those who question the model being shouted down because they somehow have it in for the worker or the country's best interest. And I don't want to start a trade war. When you institute a tariff, it usually is reciprocated with a counter-tariff by other nations, and in the end everyone loses because everyone is paying more than what they should have to, which draws capital away from other sectors that it could be put to better use.

A good and thoughtful response, Centinal. I suspect we want many of the same things for our country, even though we may disagree about how to get there.

I believe a strong middle class, based in well-compensated manufacturing, is what made the US great in the last century, and can hopefully do so again. I agree that encouraging this will be a delicate matter, if we want to avoid a trade war. But it has to be done.

Sorry I didn't know you'd ordered the book. we managed to find it a bit more cheaply than what Amazon was asking for it, with a little crashing around on the internet.

And it's printed in the US I hope you like it.

I have Amazon Prime, and I get all the use I can out of it.

Spare me the philosophical BS, Regis. I propose nothing to "restore the vast middle class" because IT ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN. Simple enough for you? It's history, it's done. You can waste your time trying to solve the unsolvable, I'm not that naive.

As to where to go from here, the first step is as I stated above: raise taxes IN CONJUNCTION with cutting spending. Move more of what government does , along with the taxes to fund it, back to the states where it belongs. Forswear the failed notion that Uncle Sugar is the answer to every problem. There has long been a name for that phenomenon: passing the buck.

Regis,

You can kiss your dream of manufacturing in the US good-by.

In today's PG:

"Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Other will face a choice: Take a job with low pay - or none at all".

It went on to say that "manufacturing is likely to keep shedding jobs, sending lower-skilled work overseas."

There is no manufacturing in the picture for this country.

High skill or no skill. That is the choice.

It is not a matter of what you believe in. It is a matter of what really is.

And I think you can forget about a "strong" middle class. That is no more. Long the whipping boy of the past and present administrations, the middle class is but a dream of times past. You can get blood from a stone for just so long.

The top 10 percent own 90 percent of the wealth in this country. So I ask, does that indicate that our economy is working? I think not, trickle down, has been a spectacular failure as far as the American people are concerned. "We" are in real trouble, and I for one, trace that trouble back to the "free trade" policies from the Reagan days in the 1980's. Had nothing to do with Unions, everything to do with wealth distribution, upward I might add.

So, according to myreply and Doggy, there is no hope of ever improving things,so why even try?

That's the spirit that made this country great, eh, fellas?

Sparky nails it.

There was a redistribution of wealth in the US and it was all upward. Once Reagan cut tax rates for the wealthy, he raised them on everyone else.

Regis:

I even quote from the PG today and still you point fingers at me and doggy. It is you who can't or won't understand that manufacturing is a thing of the past in this country.

There is not incentive for business people to have manufacturing concerns in this country. The unions have seen to that. It's just too expensive.

And then there is obama with his (un)health care bill. Business people don't know if they are coming or going.

So before saying such a foolhardy statement think about it. We actually see the world as it is and not as we wish it would be.

"business people don't know ?"

Isn't that the FREE MARKET we hear so much about ?

The only uncertainty about the health care bill is caused by republicans pandering to teabaggers prior to the 2010 mid-terms.

The Bill was passed and reduces the deficit and as it's phased in people will like it more...more will be covered, insurance companies cannnot screw rate-payers like they do today, cannot deny for pre-existing conditions, tax credits for small businesses to provide it and on and on.

Manufacturing can make a comeback and nobody is suggesting it will be what is once was, but we can be a leader in innovation and production in new industries.

Unions and the labor movement are responsible for many, many benefits enjoyed by tens of millions of working americans today and the millions upon millions of union workers for decades who bought homes, cars, appliances, sent their kids to college, bought clothes, furniture and for decades with ONE spouse working.

Overtime pay, 40 hour work weeks, holidays off, child labor laws, workplace safety rules, etc.

Bad management that didn't change with the times blame unions for their inability to modernize plants, expand markets.


Many of the things manufactured by unions still work today versus the cheap foreign stuff that doesn't last.

Manufacturing will not make a comeback.

The reason so much work was outsourced was because the unions wanted too much. It simply cost too much to make things in America.

The times that bigguy talks about are long gone. Those were simpler times when the dollar could actually buy something. Bread was a quarter etc.

Things changed. The cost of living went up, and so did the demands of the unions. Unions still live in lala land.

Yes, they accomplished many good things for the working man and woman, but somehow - along the way - they got "greedy".

And the owners said, sorry but no cigar. I can't afford to run my business and pay you the kind of wages and benefits that you "demand".

So, I'll say it again. The unions ruined it for themselves and for this country.

And they still continue ruining it.

Non-union got tired, and is tired, of paying for the unions and for themselves. Push came to shove.