wrote in message
...
On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:16:43 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
wrote:

On Jul 26, 4:37 pm, Wes wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote:
We all agree that a community organizer does not make an effective
CEO

Better to pick a corporate executive who's experienced at offshoring
and
buying consumer goods from China. They know how to boost employment --
in
other countries.

And Americans are willing to buy Chinese products. Germans seem to be a
bit better at not
cutting their own economic throat.

Maybe it is time for a bit of nationalism, the buy cheap while making a
decent wage thing
has to come to an end or we are going to turn into a Greece or third
world country.

Wes

You better hope not.

The one thing America has going for it right now is exports...other
countries are buying our stuff.

Start a trade war and watch this recession become a depression...just
like they did in the 30's.

TMT


What exports are the rest of the world buying? Andhow much real value
is this producing? The world isn't buying much in the line of consumer
goods from the US - Heck, you can hardly buy them in the USA.

US merchandise exports in 2010 were $1.29 trillion. Merchandise imports were
$1.93 trillion. You can get the full report at:

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/...ease/ft900.pdf

You want PDF page 6.

Here are consumer goods exports by category:

http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/ocg/exptab.htm

I think you can see that the popular myths are not only wildly wrong, but
downright dangerous. If we got into a trade war and had a big falloff in
exports, we'd be in much worse shape than most people imagine.

When you get into detail and look at export and import categories, you'll
realize very quickly that substituting domestic products for imports would
be very, very difficult. And there would not be really large domestic
markets for our exports. So we'd be seriously screwed if we tried that.

There are two main portals for trade data. Here's one:

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html

Here's the other (mostly data on exports):

http://export.gov/tradedata/index.asp

Export.gov is a mess right now because they're updating their website.

--
Ed Huntress