Economic Suicide: The Deconstruction of America’s Once Mighty Manufacturing Empire
In 1953, manufacturing comprised 28.3 % of America’s total economic output. This was a postwar high, capping the immense industrial build-up that occurred during World War II, when the United States became the world’s “arsenal of democracy.” The industrial might of America and her massive manufacturing base is what ultimately led the USA out of the Great Depression.
Unfortunately, the once might American industrial capacity has been allowed to wither on the vine, as a new elite engineered the rise of the financial sector as America’s most significant economic field. In the interim, U.S. industrial plants have been “outsourced,” that euphemism for the nation’s deindustrialization. By 2006, just prior to the onset of the Great Recession and global economic crisis, manufacturing represented only 12% of America’s GDP.
Financial engineering has replaced industrial engineering in the United States, while the government proportion of the total economy surges simultaneously with the shrinkage in manufacturing capacity. The very nature of the taxpayer funded automobile manufacturers’ bailout, involving the government subsidized downsizing of the industry, is a metaphor for the apparently irreversible decline of the once-mighty manufacturing and industrial behemoth that existed in America.
According to the elites running America’s economic policymaking, it makes sense to accumulate massive public debt to save the financiers and Wall Street bankers from their own costly mistakes, while ignoring the decline and fall of the U.S. industrial empire. I believe history will render a most harsh and unforgiving verdict on this myopic and irrational policy of economic suicide.
