Gee, anyone else see a long developing trend, followed by a step off the precipice here?

Image via Chart Of The Day

When people begin to wonder why the rest of the world is catching up to the U.S, and why our middle class is shrinking, you must remember that the majority of the companies in the S&P 500 are shifting their skilled and unskilled labor needs abroad under the auspices of “cost savings”.

To drive this idea home, here are a few mind blowing statistics from the Economic Collapse Blog:

• The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.
• In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
  
• The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
• In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
• As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
• The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.

What people in the board rooms fail to realize is that the primary consumer of their products are purchased in the very nation where disposable income is becoming less disposable and a basic low to middle income jobs are becoming more difficult to find.

Of course, that’s probably too forward thinking in a world where short term balance sheet metrics trump long term sustainability.

Hidden Benefits?

Not to dwell on the negative too much, I suppose one can find a few positives in this trend of outsourcing. So to play Devil’s Advocate a bit, the hidden benefits could be:

1. Cheaper prices for U.S. consumers for low tech or everyday consumables (e.g. the Walmart effect).
2. U.S. soil is less polluted over time by moving the manufacturing base overseas. In other words, we let other countries befoul their land, rivers and drinking water.
3. Foreign cultures tend to save more money than Americans do. In turn, they can invest their savings (via our consumer dollars) back into U.S. national debt. (How long this lasts is anyone’s best guess.)

Nevertheless, the tipping point of American companies bringing jobs back to American soil may be close at hand if unemployment numbers remain in the high single digits for a long enough period of time.