Comment by pessimizer

> The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor countries because they were allowed to import the products of that labor back into the country cheaply.

> Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services.

This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy. Reversing the trade deficit will not be enough. It's not that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and exclusive franchises.

But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be able to move to a country that isn't broken.

I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring manufacturing to the US because we need to produce something in order to be paid. We have no advantage in services, we only pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import talent and who are themselves immigrants. We are not only not working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever. What we're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures, and pretending like everything is just fine.

And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are like, yup, nothing's wrong.