A couple of weeks ago I came across a website that has an up-to-the-second U.S. trade deficit ticker. The U.S has had a trade deficit every year for more than 30 years!
Every month and every year we run a trade deficit we are giving away American wealth to the rest of the world. When U.S. companies build factories in China and ship our jobs overseas for cheap labor while we import the goods back into America. Everything is made in China now and very little is made in the U.S. China is just one of the countries we have outsourced our jobs to as Japan, taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other Asian countries are now the manufacturing hub of the world. In addition to manufacturing goods we import more than 80% of our oil. While some of this money goes to Mexico and Canada the majority of it goes to the middle east so some sheikh can drive a car made of solid silver. Over the last few years we have even started outsourcing customer service jobs to India and other countries. A recent study showed that 25% of the jobs in the United States are outsourcable.
The Trade ticker does not go all the way back to 1978 but you can see that since January of 2003 the United States has had a trade deficit of more than 4.3 Trillion dollars. That is 4.3 Trillion dollars of U.S. wealth that now belongs mainly to the Chinese and the Middle East. The very same people we are now indebted to and are some of our biggest creditors
