Some of my critics will say I joined them on this one, but even though the stock market may be high, and GDP growth has been steady, and high at times; the coming issue for the US is competitiveness, and a national manufacturing policy.
Our economy does have issues, and trade can show some abnormalities. By constantly focusing on one-way trade, we are losing our capacity to generate long-national wealth. (Source: American Affairs-Fall, 2019)!
I studied jobs, and a one time we had 12,484 jobs in our economy. What I can tell you now is that off-shoring has cost this nation some 5 million jobs. I saw the saw industry -Ideal, Hasbro and others leave long ago, and I saw fashion leave with Coach in Carlstadt, and a Custom Shirt factory leave Franklin with some 250 jobs lost, and for my county this was a big-time loss that I saw and continue to see even today.
Productivity growth has been falling, since 2005, and is near zero. productivity is part and parcel with competitiveness. We again have to produce world -class products. The Wall Street numbers may be beguiling, but we cannot survive on finance and a service economy. Innovation is long overdue in our place in the world economy. China will kills us in so many technologies, and is doing so at this very minute with its Belt and the Road, and recent U.S. mistakes with Huawei. Our rivals elsewhere are well-funded. Please forget your differences for once, as this is our survival.
Bill Weightman
Hardyston
I am going to steal a piece from a journal and hope that you don’t mind. In Reagan’s last year, his best economists noted the following: “ If high tech is to sustain a scale of activities sufficient to matter to prosperity.... America must control the production of those-high tech products it invests and designs.... Production is where the lion’s share of the value added is realized!”