Compared to other nine recessions and recoveries since the Second World War, the Great Recession of 2007, which very much continues especially for the long-time real unemployed, remains hindered by our nation's large trade deficit in oil, the large and again growing manufacturing trade deficit with China, and federal tax policies that continue to dissuade job creation here at home.
Crucially, the manufacturing trade deficit seems to be coming down.
Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year.
The United States is the most open market in the world, running a $456 billion manufacturing trade deficit in 2008.
The economist Christopher Smallwood has been looking at what has been happening to the UK's manufacturing trade deficit since 2005.
In current dollars, the manufacturing trade deficit was twice as large in 2010 as it was in 1998, but the output per worker was higher, so the job content of each dollar of deficit has been falling rapidly.
Our manufacturing trade deficit has reached an all-time high.
Vague talk about future innovations, about a post-industrial society, or of an enormous explosion of services exports to where they can balance the manufacturing trade deficit is not the stuff on which to bet the prosperity of a nation.
MIT's Task-Force on Production and Innovation suggests that if America is ever to reduce its gaping trade deficit, manufacturing needs to do well.No exceptionalismCertainly, bits of America are great at making things.
But the record of American employment growth, manufacturing gains, and deficit reduction over the past eight years, since the auto bailout and other federal fiscal efforts designed to jump-start the economy were announced, have shown Pence's positions to be both awkward, next to Trump's, and hard to justify, taken alone.
If China were to place orders tomorrow for $1.5 trillion in American-made goods, the effect on our economy, unemployment level, manufacturing base, budget deficit, state budget shortfalls, public-employee pensions, and a host of other problems would be immediate and dramatic.
