Where is (and what is) America's industrial base?

Question

These days we are strangely celebrating our week dollar because it will make our exports less expensive to foreign markets. But what do we have to sell? Beyond the obvious market goods (weapons (America is the world biggest weapons dealer), aeronautics, medicine, raw materials, and licensing agreements), what else are we selling to the world? Nobody wants our cars anymore, all the world’s nick-nacks are made overseas, we hardly produce electronics anymore, farming is becoming unaffordable, and how are we keeping afloat? We are quickly loosing or edge on technology; we are sending all our factory jobs away to cheaper labor. Seems we have a huge service sector, but that doesn't bring overseas money. We don't do textiles anymore. Are we in trouble? Have we been sold out to multi-national conglomerates? Should we prepare for the next economic down turn? How much more money can we borough? We buy from overseas non-stop, are nailing shut our own coffin?

Answer 1

The fact that we do export a trillion dollars a year in SOMETHING should suggest the many ways in which you are wrong. Have you really never heard of Hollywood or Microsoft? You're on a website owned by Yahoo -- you do realize Yahoo makes money from its foreign websites? I personally export a product I create with my own brainpower to foreign companies, and my company is very well paid for that.

As a general rule, the US makes and exports many things that require complex design, creativity, and impressive intellectual property, while the US does less and less of the low-level, low-value grunt work of assembly. That is how the economy is changing. That's actually a good thing, it makes us richer.

You can educate yourself by looking at some stock indexes. ALL the Dow Jones Industrial Index companies and probably all the S&P 500 companies export to other countries -- those are good examples that would expose you to the wide range of business that export. Even when those companies outsource certain operations, there is a flow of goods back and forth from overseas to the US, and they export many end products.

A few extremely profitable areas where the US is dominant and does massive exports are software, microprocessors and DSPs, college education, cellular phones and infrastructure, everything related to advanced computer networking and telecom, computers (Apple, Dell, HP), entertainment, everything related to financial services, certainly agriculture, and Boeing owns half the world market for airliners. Here's a hint: take an American company and see if they also have a .co.uk domain, as in www.amazon.co.uk.

BTW the service sector absolutely does bring in overseas money -- you have a much too limited understanding of the service sector.

Answer 2

Services are now the bulk of our exports - management and financial services in particular. However, the current account deficit is a huge issue, and the decline in the dollar is only going to make matters worse. We can expect capital flight any day now; the only thing propping up our dollar and balancing our current account are foreign central banks investing in US Treasury bills, and that's going to change. Interest rates will rise as the US borrows from an increasingly diminished investor base to fund its budget deficits, squeezing out private borrowers, which should result in a recession or perhaps depression. What's worse, because of our government's outlandish unfunded committments to social security and, now, the new prescription drugs medicaid, we will be running massive deficits until the end of time. Strap in, kids, it's going to be a wild ride!

But to answer your question, yes, services.

Answer 3

truly! before each and everything, products made contained in the U.S. are many times more beneficial high quality than the products made in China. We actually have a nasty commerce deficit with China so we favor to surrender importing a lot stuff. flow to ok-Mart or any shop (even Nordstrom). An outrageous quantity of merchandise is made in China. in case you examine up on what is going on in China, also discover out that because of the nature of the authorities, they don't attempt to guard the ambience. a sturdy area of the smog in la comes from China. by technique of shopping for chinese language products, you're area of the issue- increasing the commerce imbalance and contributing to international pollution. also, today, the american dollar is susceptible distant places; which skill we may be able to export products and they are more beneficial inexpensive to at least some thing of the international than they could be if the dollar were sturdy. Our usa has grew to develop into right into a service monetary gadget. that is time we began production again so we do no longer could count a lot on imports.