A country, just like an individual or a team can not become competitive unless they have self belief.

Unfortunately US society self-belief has been destroyed by a collection of hiper articulate hipercritics via books, movies, comedy, social agitation, etc., relentlessly for the las 40-60 years. Mainly they have destroyed they have managed to make mainly the majority of Anglos and Northern Europeans and other Europeans and even from other cultures who decided to assimilate the traditional American values and beliefs that America, while not perfect, was a worthy noble country, whose religious beliefs were worthy, whose institutions, large corporations, etc., were run by honest intelligent people.

The hipercritics have managed to put the imperfections in center stage sweeping aside almost everything that created and sustained the country. The end result is the US has been behaving collectivelly as a flawed society.

This has set off a spiral or moral degeneration and decay that will only stop when the US totally collapses or somehow the shamed and humiliated majority of all cultures and races decides it has had enough. It will not be pretty.

It is not clear to me if the hipercritics did and still do so because they want to perfect the US, in this case we have an example of bright yet stupid people, or they simply consider the US is not a worthy society because the hipercritics do not share the values of the majority and consider them dumb, backward, not worthy. If they are so smart they should go and set up the model society they pursue somewhere else, by themselves. However I am afraid the talent to criticize does not have much to do with the talent to build a prosperous, free, moral society like the US was.

When the whole thing collapses and or the hipercritics are persecuted their prophecy would have been fullfilled; they were “right” all along. It will never cross their minds they were the termites they brought the house down over themselves.

So, US lack of competitiveness is not the disease and certainly not the pathogen, it is just the symptom. Obama or Romney, Romney or Obama it makes no difference, the decay will continue…, for now.

What has been obscured is that 25 years ago we in the West and particularly America made a “Grand Bargain” over globalization. We changed our relationship to the world. We agreed to let billions of people living in very poor countries compete in our markets. We took cheap goods in return for an implicit commitment to shoulder large trade deficits and the concomitant public/private debt those deficits demand.

We negligently thought that the rest of the world would simply “catch up”, right the imbalance, and we would all be one big happy market together. We never seriously considered that it might take a couple generations for this to happen. We never seriously asked what it would mean for billions of people to try to live like 300 million Americans do, or did.

One likely answer is that we will all converge on a standard of living much higher than what used to characterize the co-called “Third World”, but substantially lower than what Americans have come to expect. We will be productive out of necessity, but that productivity will be organized by far fewer managers using all the tools of technology, and consequently we will also be very “efficient”, meaning most of us will deliver that productivity while taking less and less of the resulting wealth.

In some circles this view is heresy, but that only adds to its likeliness as an outcome.

The best and the brightest will see the handwriting on the wall, and plot their course accordingly.

Solutions are export subsidies, tax on no-export industry investment. Reforms of public education. Going back to free state universities for citizens (now most charge tut ions that many students cannot or will not meet) it can be supported by taxes on unearned income lie estate taxes, gift taxes and real-estate taxes.

So, if you are a centrist, you’re going to have to do a little research on the likely behavior of each of the candidates. Try and determine the policies of each candidate and guess at which will produce the best economic results. Obama’s policies have not been great but the US is doing better than Europe– except for Germany where their socialist policies are backed up with a strong educational system. So my money is on the candidate who’s going to educate our children.

The countries that are catching up to the US are those with the most effective and far sighted education systems paid for by their respective Governments. And I’m just not sure how deregulation and smaller government are going to help us on that front.

People are funny.  With their spending, they push companies to provide goods and services cheaper, faster, 24×7, etc.  Companies respond in a variety of ways, outsourcing being one, and then people complain about greedy companies outsourcing jobs. 

Starting after WWII, they have been dropping steadily.

This has cut the revenue we used to get from tariffs (as provided for in the Constitution), and it has placed more pressure on domestic income tax payers to make up the difference. This while the jobs move overseas under the destructive low tariff scheme. So given this, what is ‘nutty’ about getting the tariffs back up to where they were? Your comments offer no alternative or explanation.

China needs us as customers more than we need them as suppliers. We can move factories to Malaysia. They can’t find 320 million rich customers in Malaysia to replace us. We are in a position to be charging for access to our markets and we should be doing it. No?