@Thomas,
Thomas, common sense tells me that if virtually everything in a store like Walmart is made somewhere other than America, something is very wrong with what we are doing. Competing much better in the global marketplace would help in many ways. It would not only lessen imports, and also increase exports, but it would create jobs. Jobs are perhaps much more important than the statistics of imports and exports, and jobs enables us to buy stuff from each other, both goods and services. I would look at it a bit like compounding interest, the benefit compounds as one positive triggers another positive. And increasing our manufacturing sector would create jobs where they are needed most, in a sector that would help shore up the opportunities for the less educated and less skilled. If you are low skilled and not educated, there are simply not enough jobs at places like MacDonalds, and those jobs are just not good enough to support people over the long term. We hear complaints that the gap between rich and poor is growing, and although Democrats blame it upon tax policy, I think there are many other more logical reasons for it, one being the manufacturing sector falling upon hard times, due to bad tax and regulatory policies in this country.
The real goal that we need to look at is the need to create more wealth, not simply consuming what we currently have. As we have seemed to move more toward a service economy, service is of course necessary but I look at it as an economic environment in and of itself as primarily trading existing wealth for service, not creating new wealth. As it is, I think sadly we are sort of bleeding ourselves to death economically, and we need to break out of the self destructive cycle that we are currently bogged down in. We need to once again start producing more of the goods or wealth that we are consuming.
