RDKirk wrote: You have a largely commodity-based economy. U.S. manufacturing is disappearing little by little, industry by industry. By the time I finish posting the message, GM, Chrysler, and Ford may all be in bankruptcy. The U.S. is buying jet tankers from Europe while U.S. aircraft manufacturers are laying off workers. It won\'t be long before agriculture and minerals will be all we have left--and we\'re consuming them faster than we can produce them even now.
The handgun issue doesn\'t have much to do with the economy, however this second issue you mention is extremely significant--it\'s at the base of the problems of the US economy--and it\'s gotten little real notice.
Ironically, perhaps, McCain is on records as saying that the export of production capacity is not a problem (his suggestion was just to train workers to take \"better jobs\"), while Obama listed it as a major problem to be addressed.
I took an economics class at the University of the Philippines in the mid-80s, where at one point the professor noted: \"The Philippines will always be a third world country because we export tomatoes and import tomato paste.\" He was right, and I\'ve been watching that exact thing happening to the US since 1989.
Notice, this isn\'t something confined to one party or the other--both parties and our top financial interests have been exporting production capacity to China as rapidly as possible--touting the incredibly stupid concept of \"the US is a consumer economy.\" That\'s the most imbecilic thing I\'ve ever heard. A \"consumer economy\" is like a household where nobody has a job and everyone goes to the mall.
In the early 80s, I was on the headquarters staff of the Strategic Air Command. One of my jobs was to periodically place \"Request for Proposals\" into the Commerce Business Daily. The CBD is a listing of all government desires for things to be built or purchased--kind of like Craig\'s List.
Back in the 80s, when I submitted an RFP for some new widget to be built for SAC, I\'d get a hundred or more proposals from medium and small factories and fabrication plants across the country.
In the late 90s, I was back in the same location and also submitting RFPs. I\'d get only a handful of responses--less than a dozen in most cases--compared to the hundred or more I\'d get in the early 80s. Our production capacity had dwindled that much.
This is an extreme national security issue, because in a great many cases the military has fallen depending on \"single sources\" for critical requirements. In some cases, there is no US source at all.
Most people don\'t realize that the US has depended on its manufacturing capcacity to win wars from the Civil War to today. We might not have the smartest generals, but we\'ve been able to put more good hardware on the battlefield than anyone else.
That depended on having scads of small factories that were able to shift from peacetime to wartime production (the famed Norden bombsite of WWII was produced by a clockmaker--today the US doesn\'t make any clocks), and having scads of trained technicians in those small factories who could be hired by major factories when those had to ramp up for wars.
Most people don\'t realize that the Air Force depends on civilian aircraft maintenance companies for depot-level aircraft maintenance. Well, now the US aircraft companies have started sending their planes to China for depot maintenance (the Chinese facilities are cheaper because they don\'t have to be certified by the FAA or anyone else). But that means fewer jobs for American aircraft techs, and less repair capacity available for the Air Force.
General Motors builds the engines for HumVees...if GM goes down the tubes, the military loses another source of a vital component for one of its most-used vehicles. And GM subsidiary Delco makes radios for the military...if GM goes, there goes Delco.
We\'re down to one US supplier for fighter planes, one US supplier for tanker and cargo planes, one US supplier for combat uniforms, no US suppliers for laptops, and dwindling suppliers for most electronic components. The last is also critical, because those single suppliers for major weapons systems are increasingly losing US suppliers for their components.
But that\'s okay...we\'re a \"consumer economy.\"
well said
Nov 10, 2008 at 12:51 PM
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