The United States was at one time, the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen. Its immense economic machinery was the envy of the rest of the globe and it provided the foundation for the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. But no more. The once great U.S. economic machine is being dismantled piece by piece. The U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized and very few of the country’s leaders even seem to care. It was the United States that once showed the rest of the world how to mass produce televisions and automobiles and airplanes and computers, but now its industrial base is being ripped to shreds. Tens of thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas. Many of our proudest manufacturing cities have been transformed into “post-industrial” hellholes that nobody wants to live in anymore.
Meanwhile, wave after wave of shiny new factories is going up in nations such as China, India and Brazil. This is great for those countries, but for the millions of American workers that desperately needed the jobs that have been sent overseas it is not so great.
………
This is a national crisis.
The following are 21 signs that the once great U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized….
#1 The U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to 497.8 billion dollars in 2010. That represented a 32.8% increase from 2009.
#2 The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#4 In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
#5 The United States spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#6 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent and it continues to fall.
#7 The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
