To cover the loss of manufacturing jobs, our government has invented the catch phrase "service economy". This is the idiotic notion that we don't need to actually sell manufactured products; that we can grow and prosper our nation by doing each other's laundry for a fee. To conceal the loss of manufacturing jobs, the government has legislated into existence thousands upon thousands of useless paper-shuffling jobs, and declared their necessity by fiat. The most obvious is the income tax which has been so obfuscated by the government that half of you had to rely on an outside expert to figure out just what all those incomprehensible words really meant. By this device, the government has replaced those jobs that made products to sell with an equal number of jobs that produce nothing whatsoever of any worth, except to keep the unemployment figures down. This over-burdening of the American people with gratuitous regulations and paperwork has accomplished nothing except to obfuscate the loss of manufacturing jobs, and to transform the American character from innovators and inventors creating new products to that of minor clerks, peeking under each other's seat cushions for lost change.

So, with most of our manufacturing now gone, just what DOES America make? Trouble, mostly. With 4% of the world's population and 18% of the economy, we have 50% of all the lawyers, all looking to make a killing by looting those few industries that still call America home (like Microsoft). Kids don't want to be scientists and engineers; they've seen how little such people are valued in our country. Based on recent history, kids see the "big bucks" are in corporate law, specifically investment banking, leveraged buyouts, greenmail, junk bonds, in short what other countries describe as "trying to make money grow by shaking it side to side".

With America's ability to actually produce products that can compete on the open world market in decline, it's no wonder that the balance of trade is the problem it is. Nobody buys our export products because we just don't make that many any more, and like or not, we have to buy our appliances from the people who make them, which are NOT Americans. (When Ampex invented the VCR, they didn't even bother trying to find an American company to make it, they immediately sold the rights to Japan).