You are very accurate here BlueStreak:
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Bingo! The "free traders" who thought we were going to maintain our largess off of revenues generated by a "service economy" are the true jesters in the court of American economics/politics. That, and I seem to recall being told "Everything is going high tech. No more high paying manufacturing jobs." a few decades ago as well. How's that working out?
Little manufacturing = Little prosperity. Low wages = Poor consumerism.
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Except that with or with-out free-traders, MOST of those manufacturing jobs were just inevitably going offshore. This was trend since I was a pup listening to cheap Japanese audio. What SHOULD be done is to make most of that labor irrelevent. By encouraging 21st century manufacturing research and develop HERE in the USA. For the most part, we COULD take back a lot of middle class jobs even in automated factories.
And remember that the pressure is on ALL stratas of the workforce. Lower rank contends with illegal immigration, middle ranks have to compete with offshore labor, and the upper ranks are now being infiltrated by foreign college students "taking the courses that American kids just won't take" and getting H1B Visas to stay and work. Even doctors are not immune to global labor competition.
So -- I don't want to spend a lot of time blaming the morons who pushed the service economy. And the free-traders (like me) more accurately say.... "The work will be performed at the most effective level." We haven't even begun to design effective manufacturing systems. Look at stuff like IBM's Watson and how knowledge systems like that would change the whole corporate profile.
So we have to do what we can do best given that the assembly line model is gone. And that is gonna take a commitment to higher, smartter education and a govt that doesn't put too many barriers in the way of starting capital ventures. So that we can design truly innovative automation and new models of manufacturing and distribution of goods..
BTW: Besides, the wars and the downturn in the economy, REVENUES are being killed by the fact that SocSec and Medicare are going negative in income from payroll much sooner than expected. Wasn't too long ago that the CongressCritters could count on STEALING 300 or 350 BILLION dollars from peoples' paychecks in excess FICA payments. That's largely a REVENUE issue if you're the one doing the stealing.....