"because we manufactured and exported anything and everything the world needed. Today, we are the world's largest debtor nation; we manufacture damn near nothing, but import everything we want and need. Whyizzat, Mike?"
Have you been paying attention to anything that's going on this this thread? Or, for that matter, anything that went on in the last 40 years?
The move away from American made products started WELL before the 1970s.
Japanese and German industry were making serious inroads to American overseas markets as early as the late 1950s. The Japanese and Germans attacked America's overseas markets first and then went after the domestic markets.
We rebuilt their factories and their infrastructures. Theirs were new, ours were old, and were getting older, less profitable, and less productive by the minute. The cost of American labor and benefits as compared to Japan and Germany were also weighing very heavily.
American manufacturers also proved themselves to be the world masters of inagility, inability to forcast changing trends, and inability to respond even when trends were clear and ongoing.
Oh, and there's an odd connundrum about being the world's largest debtor nation.
We're also the worlds largest exporter nation ($1.75 trillon in goods and services last year), and have, by a factor of three, the world's largest GDP.
And that doesn't even take into account the amount of foreign investment into the US economy ($1.2 trillion). Gee, if our national economy is in such horrid, horrid, shape, it makes one wonder why anyone would want to invest in the US, doesn't it?
Could it be because the US economy is still, by a long shot, the largest generator of wealth in the world?
Nah.
You and others who screech about us being the world's biggest debtor nation have chosen to focus solely on one negative aspect as if that is the whole picture, and as if it defines the totality of the situation.
Nothing could be more short sighted, and nothing could be farther from the truth.
