The last 30 years have been when most of the outsourcing has taken place. It's been very bad for the middle and lower classes in this country. We've seen the industrial base shrinking drastically... And now we're in the middle of a period of low/no growth that directly followed a nasty recession. We've seen the median American family get worse off over a period of 30 years. So I'm not sure how you can claim that losing all those jobs was good for us. Unless you're an idiot. Which is possible.

But it doesn't matter. Maybe you can't trade wheat for Toyotas, but you can trade say, university educations for Toyotas. Why should all Americans be prohibited from trading for Toyotas just because some can't? Or to use the technology analogy, why should we ban all low-cost car manufacturing technologies just because one doesn't work?

101.7 looks like a rounding error. So the Chinese have been marginally better at manipulating the currency than Greenspan/Bernanke.

The past 30 years the economy has grown 1400% and the US has had 6 recessions. It's interesting how you just know that outsourcing is responsible just for the bad part, but not the good.

No we should expect our trade partners to allow us to have unfettered access to their markets if they want unfettered access to ours. Products are one piece of the economic puzzle. A somewhat smaller piece than the jobs. For it to be trade we have to actually be trading jobs. For your model to work we have to be trading farming jobs in Iowa for car manufacturing jobs in Japan. Under the current model we just lose factory jobs to Japan without getting any Japanese jobs at all. That's pretty much terrible.

Grown 1400%, yet people are unemployed(though you claim above outsourcing has nothing to do with unemployment, among other things) and underemployed...wages have stagnated while the cost of living has rose(except for upper incomes). Sheer awesomeness. Apparently there is no problem with our economy at all. Fantastic!

b

This article might help you with the basic concepts.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoz...lator-no-more/

And incredibly all of the gains have managed to avoid the bottom 70% of the population. Also how much of that gain is paper profits generated by the financial sector?

Also that's nominal growth, not real growth. Normalize it for inflation and it's a much smaller number.

The fact that Japan is a country with people that have jobs is confusing matters for you. Like, if tomorrow it turned out that Japan was just a giant hoax and there's really just a big machine in the Pacific Ocean that makes all its products, you'd suddenly lose all concern for matters like "trading jobs" and whether we had unfettered access to the machine's "markets". But from the perspective of Americans, both would be identical from a commercial standpoint.

read better, maybe the part with bad.
not true
not relevant

and still very large.

See also: economics

If the bank loans you a thousand dollars the bank owns you, if the bank loans you a million dollars you own the bank, because the bank depends on you fulfilling your end of the bargain. China bought US dollars in exchange for devaluing their currency. The US in turn can devalue the US currency and screw over the Chinese on their investment. The Chinese elite tethered themselves to the US economy ( and the US created the reverse dependency by spending like crazy) by devaluing their currency relative to the US dollar so now the US can inflict untold amounts of pain on the Chinese by simply printing their way out of the debt. The Chinese created this dependency on the US dollar, and now they have to live with it, for bad or good. They can increase the value of their currency which means manufacturing moves to the US or Vietnam or where ever relatively or they can wallow in the depressed economic increase courtesy of the US. The Chinese think they own the US but, in fact, the opposite is true or rather both are dependent on each other. It's a duel independency to the determent to both, but more so to the Chinese.

Go back to 1982 and compare our economy to the rest of those countries. Also view the % of jobs we had in manufacturing then vs now. You can find data to show whatever you want... Yours isn't particularly good.

In 1950 we were way better in 1982. It's a matter of relativity and relative to trends not in absolute terms.

If a company could pay a robot $10/day to do the same work as a $200/day American worker, would that be a good idea? Should that be allowed and/or encouraged?

If a company could pay a Chinese kid $10/day to do the same work as a $200/day American worker, would that be a good idea? Should that be allowed and/or encouraged?

I'd like to hear reasoning from anyone who has different answers between those two questions.