The most common three words in the USA

If one looks around a lot these days, it won't take long to see the most common three words in the United States.

Made in China.

Manufacturing jobs are moving to China at an unprecedented rate -- leaving us to wonder what will become of our economy in the long run.

One can theorize as to the reasons for this process, and it is complicated in many ways, but the bottom line is this -- people in the rest of the world are willing (and eager) to work for less money than Americans.

And, unfortunately, it's a lot less.

We keep hearing that we are now in a global economy and, to the extent that is true, it apparently doesn't bode well for any of us.

We have seen more than one column in recent days in which the writer indicated he or she went shopping with the idea of buying as many American-made products as possible. Well, we all know what they found -- it's just about impossible to do that.

One can spend a lot of time looking at labels and primarily see Malaysia, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and on and on. I just now looked at the shirt I am wearing and it was made in Hong Kong.

For awhile the world's largest retailer was quite prominent with its "Made in the USA" promotion. There was some question as to the actual validity to the claim, but it did make us all feel good.

Now we all can agree that Wal-Mart doesn't really mess with that pretense anymore. Recent news stories have pointed to the billions of dollars of products the company is purchasing each year in China.

To be fair, there is something of a vicious circle here.

Wal-Mart, and other retailers, correctly point out that consumers want goods at the lowest possible prices. Competition is the cornerstone of our business society. Therefore, if one can purchase goods most cheaply in China and other low-wage countries, that's no doubt what will happen.

But the larger issue, it seems to us, is to raise questions about the long-term effects of the road we are traveling. Stores may stock shelf after shelf of relatively low-cost items, but what if very few have enough disposable income to buy the goods?

There is no question the current road we are traveling is a severe threat to our tradition of a strong middle class in America. A huge component of that middle class throughout the second half of the 20th Century was the reasonably-paid manufacturing employee. As we know, those jobs are disappearing rapidly.

The movement to a service and information economy is acceptable to a point, but we agree with a business owner who told us several months ago that a nation not producing anything eventually will fail economically.

The South, and its rural areas in particular, likely will bear a lot of the brunt of this problem. Traditionally, the rural South has been an area in which manufacturers looked for relatively inexpensive labor. These areas are now being bypassed (or abandoned) as jobs go overseas.

While we do not claim to have the answers to the "Made in China" explosion, we do know there has been acceleration to this trend in recent years.

Hardline protectionism, and its resulting higher prices for American consumers, is not the answer. But we do wonder if the "globalization" process has been allowed to gallop almost out of control.

There has to be some middle ground on this in which certain demands are made in terms of working conditions and wages relating to imports from China and other similar markets.

At the rate we are going, "Made in China" will be what brings our nation down more definitively than from sources that we more traditionally perceive as threats.