THE TRADE IMBALANCE

Step 8: In order to have true long term prosperity, we need to export more goods than we import. We haven't done this for decades. Witness the results: tremendous explosion of the middle class in China and India, - ongoing degradation of our middle class standard of living.

The short term fix for this produces a double benefit for deficit reduction. Slap high tax duties on all imported products, high enough that American produced goods are more than price competitive. Result: more tax revenue immediately, and more incentive for companies to bring plants/jobs back home. Plants and jobs here also means increased tax revenue.

Some background: The single largest factor in our past prosperity was the superiority of American products. Our products were more innovative, and of much better quality, than could be obtained from anywhere else in the world. What happened? See previous posts on greed. By the 1970's American automobiles were junk. Quality control was a joke, not because of the assembly line workers, but because of management's push for more and more profit. As I said in an earlier post, today's companies have entire buildings full of engineers whose job is not to design better products, but figure out how to build them cheaper. Now that's fine as long as quality is not compromised, but that doesn't happen. The CEO's, Presidents, and VP's set a figure they demand costs be reduced by. It's the engineers job to make it happen, whatever it takes. So now we have throwaway products. When it breaks, buy a new one. And the executives know that increases sales, so they get a double increase in profit. Again: GREED.

We need to return to leading the world in innovation and quality. We need to invest in pure science. The truth is the continuing existence of the human race on this planet hinges on large advances in physics. We are going to poison ourselves into extinction if we continue as we have been. Witness air pollution in China so bad that at times they have had to ban ALL auto travel in some major cities because people were actually falling over in the streets. Google China pollution - it's an eye opener.

We need truly clean, affordable energy sources. The field of quantum physics shows that this is possible. We need the "beam me up Scotty" beam. America needs to be in the forefront of this development. We need to do whatever it takes to get the brightest theoretical physicists in the world working in and for American laboratories. We need to continue to invest in space exploration. This planet will run out of natural resources eventually. This country needs to be in control of asteroid and planet mining. (I told you I'm now talking long term prosperity, so our grand and great grand children will have a decent life.)



Food for thought: Speaking of running out of natural resources, the number of earthquakes worldwide has been increasing almost exponentially throughout the 20th century (and now the 21st). Has anyone thought that there may be a connection to all the oil and gas we've pumped out of the earth? Or is it just fulfilling another end times prophecy in the Bible?

American agriculture next,
Dumb Farmer