I disagree Ed.

If we are so productive, then why are the jobs leaving the country?

Because we may be the most productive, but we aren't the cheapest. They
are
two different things. Productivity is a measure of the dollar (or other
currency) value of output per labor hour. Cheapness is a measure of how
much
one has to pay to get something made. If you're Reebock and you can get
running shoes assembled in the interior of China for $0.17/hour, you don't
care if they only get 1/10th the productivity of US workers, or even
1/20th.

If we are so productive, then why has so much of our manufacturing
infrastructure been moved offshore?

See above.

I would suggest looking at the national debt, the rate of lending that
the Feds doing and the loss of housing equity and then get back to me
as to how much money/credit this country still has.


You can't draw a conclusion about how much money or credit we have from
that
information, TMT. As for our national debt, as a percentage of our GDP it
is
less than that of Japan, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France,
Germany, and about 60 other countries. You'll have to define what
constitutes "lending," in your view, by the Fed before we can address that
question. Regarding housing equity, the bubble of exuberance is getting a
haircut and probably will decline to something closer to housing's true
replacement value.

--
Ed Huntress


It's also not a fair comparison to simply look at debt as a percentage of
GDP. You have to look at what a country is going into debt for. Has a
country made major inventments in the future or in its infrastructure? Has
it borrowed to make the country better? Or has it borrowed and gotten
nothing for it, like us. We have borrowed the entire cost of the Iraq war.
We have paid for none of it. That's bad debt. We owe a lot of money but have
nothing to show for it. So tell us what the other countries with higher debt
than the US went into hock for because one thing is for sure they didn't go
into debt for a war of choice.

Hawke