America's Competitiveness

The question being raised today is, “Is America becoming non competitive or has it already attained non competitiveness with its major trading partners?” This question is rather bold but it has to be on the minds of many even though it is not exactly receiving the attention that is being given to such temporal matters as the Gulf oil leak; the floor mat problem that caused Toyota cars to enter states of uncontrolled surges; a basketball players intentions and state provided housing being forced on a spoiled California brat.

If you think about the prior paragraph you may not really need any more information to both answer the question posed as well as understand the reasons for America’s apparent non competitiveness. But that is a bit cynical. And the question is worthy of serious examination and analysis.

America produced generations of growing populations; growing economic activity; growing employment opportunities and growing self satisfaction with its performance and continued expectation for same. But now, we are asking, “Is it over?” Are we on the route Japan has taken with an aging, demanding population and all substantive economic activity going to emerging growth countries with access to resources; ready, willing and able lower cost labor and undeveloped governmental and legal burdens on the business community and their commercial, wealth producing activities? What is the answer? Is there an answer or are we just being impatient? Should we believe the politicians in power (PIP) who tell us that this problem is temporal and that their policies will provide the cure for the mess that was solely done to us by the poor management and policies of the party out of power (POOP)?

Is America just in the midst of a correction and, when completed, growth will return, employment will grow and the American technological, innovative, productive economy will again rule the seas around us and continue to make us the greatest opportunity land of all?

We have concluded that there are now significant reasons to believe that America has embedded fundamental anti competitive forces in its economy that will burden its ability to grow and produce necessary employment for an expanding population and not even sustain the standard of living the previous generation experienced. We offer as evidence the poor position of America’s export per capita performance – we trail all of the following countries, several by very substantial amounts: Netherlands, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Great Britain, South Korea, Australia and Spain.

The source of this data is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports_per_capita

Why is America’s performance so poor?

We offer these areas for examination:

• High ratio of non wealth producing labor activities to wealth producing labor activities (i.e. too many people either not working or not working in basic (manufacturing, agriculture, extraction, innovation) jobs)

• High consumption of public resources by military spending, wars and related activities

• High ratio of lawyer involvement in commerce activities in the form of protected classes, special interests, litigation and bureaucratic rules and enforcement

• Too many laws and government agencies that don’t expire; don’t evolve; don’t make sense

• Drastically higher costs for public services than available in the private sector; too many taxes

• Drastically higher health care costs than any other competitive, economically active country

• Higher education costs and poorer education results that any other competitive, economically active country

• Thirty years of bad political, fiscal and economic leadership offset previously by technological and process innovation and improvements that now are common in emerging countries

TheFundamentals sees no opportunity to address these issues in an election year because the two American political power communication machines will devastate any one with the knowledge, the facts, the analysis and the courage to even raise them in a public forum. Of course, they are commonly and actively discussed and debated behind the scenes; but don’t expect a politician to embrace any aspect of an intelligent review of these issues lest they be discarded into the “nut case” category currently occupied by Ron Paul, Sarah Palin and others. Better to be a proven failure but in the good stead of the PR machines. We include in this category current politicians such as the governors of Michigan, Illinois, New York and California. But, we are not running for office and as sure as night follows day, remedies for the issues defined above will either be embraced by policy decisions, forced on America by creditors or will be written about by historians analyzing the decline of America.

Only you, the American voter, can force this discussion.  Those who have been chosen to lead will not.