How does the US become a "producer" again and not such a consumer?

That's the fundamental problem in the nation...

Although the wealthy still have $$... the nation as a whole has become less wealthy.

It's actually quite simple... as a nation we don't PRODUCE enough and CONSUME too much. Our consumption outpaces our production so we're consuming basically on someone elses dime.

So who was the complete idiot who started teaching their kids that factory work and the trades were beneath them and encouraged them to run out and get Liberal Arts degrees?

I've see Engineering classes in College... there's like 3 American kids in a 40 student class.

This nation needs a fundamental overhaul to be great again.

Lots of people would be happy to have the work - it's just too hard to commute to China every day.

to name a few easy ones.

since I was a child in the 70's, watching the steel industry collapse.

Go back a hundred years and instead of plundering other countries - help them instead. That way their wages would be less competitive now against US wages and your jobs wouldn't have moved abroad.

Easy peasy...........get to it.

You're suffering from your own past and the UK is too.

the last 2 "booms" we've had were fake.

One was the dot.com boom where we assigned a value to a thing that had no real value. Inflated value lead to the production of "fake money"... money that appeared from thin air. Not money generated by a product or a service transacted.

Two was the housing boom... where a 150K house became a 300k house and the owners used the 150k to buy jet ski's, an RV and a new F-350. Thse items were purchased with "fake money"... because that money was never "earned"... it was not the product of a product or service transacted with real value.

So a few years later... the economy wakes up and realizes that the fake money finally shows up on someone's balance sheet... and what does it getcha?

"So who was the complete idiot who started teaching their kids that factory work and the trades were beneath them and encouraged them to run out and get Liberal Arts degrees?"

Umm, that would be factory workers. My family worked coal in the Appalachians because they lacked the connections to work Steel in Pittsburgh.

We no longer produce because people in other nations are all too often forced to work for subsidence wages. And then our leaders force that on us through preferential treaties like NAFTA or the current one the Obama administration is about to present that will wipe out the last vestiges of textile work in the USA.

I suspect that the mega-transnational corporations and their subsidiaries in Congress and the White House have already decided (and pretty much implemented) that the U.S. is going to be a high population, low wage, consumer market for cheaply made products from Asia.

They, the power elite, will be 'super' rich and powerful ... beyond even the imaginings for the 'Super Congress'.

Of course, if we could stage an economic revolution here, we might be able to become the republic of our fore fathers once again ... community economics, trades and crafts, local control, grassroots democracy, etc.

But since according to some folks here at DU, the Democrats and Pres. Obama scored a great triumph with the debt ceiling deal, well, I don't see any 'hope' or 'change' coming our way very soon.

don't actually do it.

For example, say I'm a truck driver and I would love to have real wood bookshelves made by a local craftsman instead of particleboard shelves from Target.

Unfortunately, I don't have the cash-money for even a $200 shelf, so I get a $50 shelf instead.

All the local people involved in logging and milling the wood and making furniture go out of business so there's less trucking and my wages collapse. Then I can't even afford to buy a $50 shelf.

On the other side of the coin, the cheap, local distribution networks are destroyed, so the $200 local shelf becomes an $800 regional shelf.



It's a simplified analogy, but it's what's happened to the entire country. Wealthy people can afford to support an elite group of craftspeople, while the rest of us schmoes are putting our Chaucer and Shakespeare on melamine crap from China.

I don't intellectually support it, but I sure as hell economically support it 'cause I don't get paid enough to opt out.

and import products made by workers who make next to nothing. How do we compete with that?

Even the automakers are making $14 an hour and they were the backbone of our economy.

How in the world do we bring good paying production jobs back?

Everyone is sick of shoddy Chinese junk.

Make it here, make it right, give it a nice long warranty and stand by your products.
The customers will come back.

in terms of electronic gadgets--My kids and I have to be the last people we know with regular cellphones, no internet on our phones. We are probably at least 3 years behind the times, but our phones still work just fine. Americans do demand constant newer and better things, no matter how shitty our wages and benefits are becoming, no matter who manufactures what we buy, and no matter how well our "old obsolete" stuff still works.

Either the phones died or they were for systems that aren't there anymore (TDMA, analog).
Then there are the early wireless Internet devices, all using gateway networks that no longer exist (e.g. ARDIS, Palm)

Used to be us hams could re-purpose old radios for amateur radio use (which is why I can't bear to throw any of this stuff out)
but everything is so small and integrated on this stuff, and it's all surface-mount.
Needs steadier hands than I've got.