not necessarily. His point is that because of all the spending in military, we do not invest in our infrastructure. Because of that we lost our edge to compete in the world market for goods.

Obviously, one component of this is price, and our labor costs are higher. But the other component is that we do not have the infrastructure in place to produce world class goods. Other countries are able to trade their profits from trade surplus' and reinvest it. We no trade surplus, we have no funds to reinvest.

And I think that gets back to your discussion of trade agreements. It's kind of the same issue as immigration.

We have a massive base of immigrants here that because of their work ethic, and willingness to work for less, we depend on. To the point that, at least in LA, if you go into some ethnic restaurants of other then hispanic persuation, there will be hispanics working there. So things that we pay for that are produced within the US would become massively more expensive if the people who say we should round up the 12 million hispanics and send them home.

In trade, we have become dependent on foreign goods that we can not produce equivalents of in the US. Either because of cost, or quality. For example, the article I referenced mentioned the massive amounts of technical people the govt hired to put on nuclear bomb projects. I'm not an expert, but maybe we would have better qualified engineers in the US auto industry if they weren't working for the govt. And the US auto industry would not have the problems they have selling domestically.


>There is no question military spending is HUGE right now and much larger than we can afford. Yet this is not about military spending. It is about trade and the free market. Yet it amazes me that all I hear are complaints whenever the mention of changing trade agreements in order to improve the trade deficit is discussed. Sheesh...
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>>And you wingnuts who brag that the US is great cause we got such a massive military get a special mention in this piece:
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>>Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's World Factbook, is the European Union. The E.U.'s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. Moreover, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.
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>>A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the U.S. and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance (China is number one). The U.S. is number 163 -- last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the U.K. that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.
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>>http://www.alternet.org/story/83555/?page=1