Billy Goats Gruff

Big hubbub regarding a recent Sacramento Bee article describing how Bay Area commuters are saving $400,000,000 dollars by outsourcing pre-fabricated sections of the new bay bridge to China.

The usual claptrap in the letters to the editor -- indeed, the same claptrap I often argue here on my blog: "How safe will you feel driving on Chinese made roadbeds?" or "Thanks to our state government we're continuing to feel the effects of 12% unemployment," or "we're only perpetuating wage-slaves in Hongzhau," or other such banter.

No letter writer bothered to write the obvious : "The use of Chinese labor and manufacturing will allow each of you to pay only $8 at the toll booth instead of $12."

No discussion about that. None at all. We bitch and we bitch and we bitch about the loss of good wages or the use of slave-labor or the unregulated emissions released by thousands of Chinese coal plants, but then we climb into our Japanese-designed vehicular units and drive to Walmart and marvel at the wonderfully low prices on a new color-matched Chinese made blender that will fit quite nicely on the new countertop as the old one, while perfectly usable, doesn't quite match our new kitchen.

We don't seem to mind cheap Chinese household appliances. Yes, let them rat-bastards employ slave-wage labor to build shit like that over there, but a bridge section? Whoa. No-no-no-no-no-no, we have to drive on that, and would you trust taking your children across that bridge now that you know who built it? I wouldn't.

I only point out the hypocrisy of Americans who seem to think that we're getting taxed to death (with the lowest real rates over the past eight decades) and that we ought not pay a $12 toll to keep manufacturing local. We want cheap plastic hairdryers and refuse to pay American wages to make them. We want unrestrained services from our governments (for roads!) but we refuse to pay for them.

We are a services nation, not a manufacturing nation. We don't need to be building bridge sections -- leave that icky, icky work to developing nations. No, our job in the global economic hierarchy is to consume shit, not to build it. Our job is to spend the workweek in a cubicle in some too big to fail bank trying to make insolvent borrowers and insolvent lenders both appear solvent, then wake up every Saturday and pay the lowest possible rate for a toll so that we can comfortably drive the 99 miles to San Francisco in an Asian car on gold-plated out-sourced freeways (they're "free!") to enjoy Vietnamese farm-raised clams inside that "Manhattan" clam chowder in a bread bowl while enjoying touring the relics (WWII submarines and liberty ships) of a former manufacturing powerhouse.

And all the while we're adding a million dollars more every forty-eight seconds to our $14,472,276,393,201 national debt, telling the next buyer of our Treasury's "Mr. Troll, please let me pass -- there's a bigger, fatter, more capable future generation ahead of us who will have even better means to pay down the debts we're currently incurring."

Our debt, which we are continuing to add to by building half-trillion dollar bridges using federal matching funds, our debt which we will never pay back, is indeed the troll under the new bay bridge.