Party On, Dude!

Man, as I look around my house at all the consumer junk we've bought, there isn't one thing since, say, 1997, built domestically.
We held a birthday party with a number of people over this weekend and there really wasn't one single thing, not one prop, not one gift given, that was made in the USA. My gift was an assembly of component items whose companies are listed in the U.S. but whose products were manufactured in...where else...China.

It seems to me that our nation is solely filled with jobs selling foreign made shit to other people whose jobs are to sell foreign made shit back to them.

Come on. They owner of the party rental store here in Elk Grove. Do you think for one second any of her wares (trinkets, chair and table rentals, little plastic grooms and brides for atop cakes) aren't Chinese? Her job is, exclusively, to sell foreign made shit to other people...people such as me. Her store is loaded with expendable items that are intended to be used once then shit canned.

Shouldn't they be, you ask? Isn't that the function of global trade, to allow the comparative advantage of nations to manufacture all they can of what they produce best/cheapest? And if the rest of the world doesn't mind building stuff cheaper than us, and that we decide to rescind manufacturing and instead turn to the retail selling of said items and then making the really good profit margins by selling insurance on it and financial products to fund it, isn't that better for everyone?

Perhaps it is.

But I'll be here to tell you that there is a differential in the standard of living here vs. the rest of the world that is increasingly narrowing, to which I believe the U.S. standard will fall to meet the rising standard of everyone else -- it won't be that we maintain our current standard and the rest of the world rises to our existing level. It won't be, because our standard has been hallucinated for the past thirty years -- hallucinated property wealth, dot-com wealth, declining wealth in our natural resources in oil, timber, coal, natural gas, uranium, declining wage growth...

This idea that we've lost $7 trillion in property values and six million jobs since 2007 -- it's bullshit because that wealth never existed in the first place, it was all hallucinated. It was borrowed at the expense of today, and today (propped up by trillions in stimulation/bailouts/tax credits/cash-4-clunkers) doesn't look all that good, knowing that today's standard is a function of both our efforts today along with a sizable portion of tomorrow's efforts.

But for yesterday, our party was great. Didn't think about all this stuff for a few hours, and indeed fell right into how the rest of the U.S. goes about their weekends. Didn't care a whit about where those deviled eggs or the soybean oil in the mayonnaise came from, or the salami in the submarine sandwiches, or the little plastic shot glasses, or the HFCS in the margarita mix, or the paper in those Hallmar....