Pew Poll: Isolationism and China Rising

This country has gone downhill, because we allowed Coporate America, to send all of our manufacturing off shore, sacrificing the jobs and well being of citizens.
Most ordinary Americans get that. It is government that doesn’t get it.
Government must take action to provide incentives for American companies to produce in America. Plain and simple.
Americans, must stop buying what is cheapest, and they must start buying American, once again. It is in their overall best interest, to buy less, and buy American.

It’s rathern naive to point fingers at coporate america. Take GM as an example, it’s really easy for us to blame companies like GM to invest in China — therefore, shipping jobs overseas. For GM, however, it’s a game of survival. GM is losing over $1,000 each vechicle it makes here in North America. However, it’s making billions of dollars of profit in China. Without profits from China and other countries, GM would have been dead. which means tens of thousands people who’re still working for GM today in the US would have vanished. As I see it, it all comes down to competitiveness. GM would be the greatest auto maker again in the universe if it could beat the Japanese in quality, the Chinese in cost of operations. It’s really what capitalism is all about: you’ll die if you can’t compete.

The plan (international socialism) has always been the deflating of America and the inflating of the under developed world. That is what Outsourcing is and that is what Cap and Trade is. Wakeup, One world government is here and it is not based in Democracy or “one man one vote”. It is based in “elitism and privilege” vs “fall in line and shut up.”

the price of our interventions around the globe has been staggering, both monetarily and socially. the polarization of the nation that has accompanied the nation’s foreign strategies in the last decade brought this on. but shall the admin. respond? shall we focus on home and hearth and ignore foreign struggles? don’t bet on it…

I think isolationism is an incorrect interpretation of America “minding its own business internationally.” I am an American Expat living between Honduras and London, and I hardly feel like the US should withdraw from the rest of the world, but I do believe that America should let other countries make their own decisions. There’s a big difference.

Education in China is VALUED for all. Even Cuba educate their own..even they know that a Strong Country depends on education and wealth….Not just Military Might! Now we can barely maintain that monetarily. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING! TAX CUTS TO THE Wealthiest Americans can’t hold up the REMAINING 99%. THEY STOP CREATING JOBS AND POCKET THEIR WEALTH AND HIDE IT OVERSEAS IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. NOW THE SYSTEM THAT WERE CREATED IN THE 1980′S THAT WE SEE THE END RESULT TODAY WERE DUMB, DUMB, DUMB!

Right on sara.
I just don’t understand how Republican voodoo math works. A pathetic 5 Million new jobs were created over the past 8 years. And don’t forget this recession began in 2007, right after almost a decade of supply side tax cuts and financial deregulation.
Today millions of the middle class live paycheck to paycheck, frightened that a medical problem or a layoff will destroy a lifetime of work.
One in eight Americans is on food stamps.
Over 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy EVERY month.
And, $5 Trillion has disappeared from middle class pensions and savings.
Back in the 60s, America’s middle class income jumped 33% (adjusted for inflation) – but during the booming 2000s, families gained a teensy 1.6% income increase.
So what happened to all our nation’s wealth? Take a close look at the financial industry that is supposed to serve us. For decades this industry has reaped Billions selling new fangled credit, inventing “fees”, and gambling with products like “swaps”. When their shady practices helped trigger our current financial crisis, the financial industry came to Washington for a handout, paid for by the peons. And now their powerful lobbies want to preserve the rules that got us into this mess.
Anyone who howls that new government banking regulations means “socialism” has been duped.

The US economy seems much bigger than China’s only because of overvalued US dollars.China is already the greatest industrial nation on earth.The US military will stay the world’s strongest for maybe another 25 years and then decline as US economic power does.Give China a juts place and all credit but US has been pretty stupid about itself.

The poll wasn’t asking if American’s should be more isolationist, it was asking if we should mind our own business. As in, the Swiss mind their own business, but are in no way isolationist.
It is a sad day when the idea of non-intervention gets equated with being an isolationist.
The media loves to use the word isolationist because it has a worse connotation to make it seem like those who oppose unjust meddling through war and bloodshed are on the wrong side.
What is even funnier is that the U.S. with it’s neo-cons and neo-libs, is becoming more socialistic/communistic, while China is becoming more capitalistic.
When china was communistic it was ruled by a tyrant who murdered millions, and their economy was crap, as they become more capitalistic, their economy gets better, hmmmmm. Why do you fools want to be more socialistic in America, so we can be like China under Mao?

Take the last twenty years of pork projects and wasted government bureaucracy programs and we’d be just fine. But both (BOTH) parties have some blame in this. The current party in power just believes that waste and government fraud are preferable to Capitalism. Idiots one and all.
Isolationism, absolutely until we get back on our feet. Dumping everyone in Washington DC is a perfect start.

You have to look back and see where the biggest mistakes were. They started in earnest during the Clinton years, and then really blew up during Hapless Bush’s horrible rein.
The ruling elite does try to guide society to grow the economy and bring jobs. That is government’s job. Dot com, nanotech, and biotech were supposed to be three pillars of post-industrial growth that would generate millions of millionaires and tens of thousands of billionaires for America, and hundreds of millions of good paying knowledge jobs. Let the Chinese and other developing fools take the menial twenty-cents an hour jobs. We Americans are moving on with great new industries that would replace brick and mortar.
It was brilliantly planned and for a while appeared to be equally well executed. Until the bubble bursted.
Then what was left? Consumption has to remain the only real pillar to drive growth, and how were Americans going to come up with the cash to buy more of everything and grow the economy and bring at least service jobs? The moneychangers came up with the brilliant idea of perpetual growth. As long as the American military maintain a state of war in critical locales, and as long as those bombs continue dropping, the thinking goes, the world will continue to value America as the final safe haven for investments, and there’d be no end to those treasury sales. So the newest growth industry was born – it is called Fiat Money Creation. The hardest part was convincing the foreigners to keep buying, but that had seemed workable at least, for over a decade now.
Bush was really casting around for yet another growth industry, as the internet, nano, and biotech all failed to create much wealth or jobs. The moneychangers stepped up to the plate again, and DERIVATIVES, the most toxic of all human fraud in history, really come to flower.
Today the fraud continues, even after it brought down the U.S. economy by a few notches. Today there are 1.4 QUADRILLION in face amount of financial derivatives in force in the world, and most of that originate from America. That is QUADRILLION as in 1,400,000 Billions. Up 1 percent, down 1 percent, that is enough to wipe out most of America’s total assets (less than 100 Trillion).
Instead of throwing the criminal money changers in jail and seizing all of their assets, Bush and now Obame throw over $2 trillion at the moneychangers to prevent them from going under. Yes, and that continues today.
Until the moneychangers are put away, and these fraudulent gamblling contracts are unwound, and all the fraudsters billions are returned to the people, America has no hope.

So basically the nation is starting to reflect what Ron Paul advised during the debates. By the way it is nonintervention and not isolation that I believe Americans want. What is troubling about Americans seeing China as the dominant power? Now China can attack everyone instead of us. Might be nice for a change, certainly in the pocketbook.

Sadly much of this was not caused by, or could have been prevented by, out political parties. The reality is that the average worker in China makes about $250/month(US equivalent) with Indian workers being about the same. No policy could prevent the inevitable shift of labor to those markets when the infrastructure to support the workforce was in place. Look to global shipping and the internet as the primary driving force behind the offshore outsourcing.
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We thought in the US that only low paying labor would be outsourced. WRONG. India now graduates almost as many engineers as the US, and China more than doubles the US engineering graduates. They receive much of their education here, and take their skills back home for lower pay, but more relaxed regulation and a better business environment. What’s left for the US service sector are low paying hourly jobs. The high paying financial services jobs are having their own bubble right now. Another five years and those will be gone too. Ten years later, medical services will be outsourced to India too. Anyone need angioplasty at 1/3 the cost of a US hospital, with equally skilled(and maybe US trained) doctors and nurses? No malpractice and limits to civil suits make India a very attractive place to be a doctor. Think about it.

htgriff – you are on the money, literally.

sara-A lot of what you say is true. The theory of trickle down does not work because of inflation. It really then becomes trickle up as in moving wealth from the poor to the rich. I don’t know what the answer is on heathcare. To be honest we have way to much demand and we are now a broke nation. I always advocate for organics and a healthy lifestyle to decrease this demand, but that would require that Americans care and become educated. The government as in FDA and USDA tell us that the corporate food that we are eating is healthy when in truth most of it is not.

Adrian….maybe if policies weren’t made to Encourage American Automakers to build inferior cars, so Americans would buy every three years. WRONG! This is what did the American automakers in. Then we were Brainwashed that European cars were better. This was done to Burst the Unions.. In Mississippi, the poorest State in the nation has a Mercedes car manufacturing there….wages 9-10 bucks an hour, with no unions. Not a bad deal for a car selling for 50,000 bucks. Is this a living wage for a family of 4 in America. No.

Bill… this administration is dealing with the End results of these Messes made in the 1980′s under President Reagan. Take your blinders off and get real. Matter of fact, I liked Nixon. He didn’t steal EVERYTHING during his time in office, because America was doing very well fiancially. That was BEFORE REAGANOMICS.

Wall St. and multinational corporations own the majority of Congress, and they have owned the executive office ever since at least Reagan’s time. Therefore, policy has been hell-bent on offshoring and outsourcing as much of America’s manufacturing and tech sector as possible. Also, financial deregulation has allowed the banks to ensnare much of the population into debt servitude, as well as allowing investment banks to burn the whole house of cards down to a crisp.
The days of an FDR who stood up to the monied elite in favor of the blue-collar and middle classes are long gone; corporate puppets like Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama herding all of us into the line of Wall St’s fire.

sara – Nixon made one of our biggest mistakes. He oversaw the dollar delinkage from gold. This meant that the government along with its spending could increase exponentially. With a politicized Federal reserve this has been disastrous. The Carter Doctrine sent us down the road of endless wars for resources. Reagan ballooned the deficit to bankrupt the Soviets. Clinton saw to it that all our jobs were outsourced by running huge trade deficits. The Bushes sent us to war needlessly in some cases while growing government yet again. Obama is essentially driving us off a cliff because he buys into the Keynesian thinking that further stimulus is always the answer. Government has failed us by putting us on a bubble that was and is unsustainable. The US rigged the world system with our dollar reserve standard for half a century but that is coming to an end. There is nothing Obama or Bernanke or any of them can do to avoid the pain that is necessary with the correction that is due. They have chosen a path of quantitative easing instead of corporate bankruptcies. Now the dollar bubble is coming. That one is going to be real bad. It is just fact. It is both parties that have chosen corporatism over free-market capitalism for decades and now we deal with the consequences.

Can someone please explain to these people that an empire with over 800 military bases in foreign countries, and with occupation forces in many countries–like Korea, Japan, Guam, Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and many others–cannot be isolationist. And anyway, whomever these so-called isolationists are, who gives a pigeon’s toe what they think?

The Bushes sent us to WARS, and gave Huge Tax Cuts to the 1% …. the country was in a recession when Clinton took office….but my point is simple, the policies that were set forth in the 1980′s by Reagan, and continued under Bush, Clinton and Bush got us to this point. Any smart person wouldn’t dare think that you can stimulate what isn’t there. But we are a country, and not only did the U.S. stimulate the economy, other countries did also. Then I guess Germany, Britian, and France must have Keynesian thinking also, and for that matter, the economy is coming back. What was he suppose to do.? I am not confused, that our economy was beginning to go south as early as 2002. It continue it downward spiral out of neglect….but there was a process to getting to the cliff.

Minding your own business internationally is called non-interventionism.
Isoaltionism is intervenionist foreign policy characterized by US policy towards Cuba or UN trade sanctions.

Obama and the Liberals must be very happy – they’ve accomplished exactly what they intended – turning the US into Southern Canada.

Huh | Dec 3, 2009 9:24:52 PM posted: “The problem with unrestrained Keynes-type policies is that government gets to be too big and thereby insolvent. It is what has happened to us, and you will realize this very soon. My guess is within 5 years.”
Do you know anyone who lived through the Great Depression? Just curious about how much age experience you bring to the forecast.

catman, before you declare yourself the victor you really need to elaborate a bit more on your position. You just blurted out your opinion without backing it up without any facts, or what led you to form your opinion. I try to learn as much as I can from many different perspectives. You didn’t make a persuasive argument. Kind of reminds me of a certain Person who declared “Mission Accomplished”, when in fact nothing could have been further from the truth.

I, too, have profound reservations about the journalistic responsibility behind the analysis of the questions polled. The poll’s conclusions seem to equate “less imperialistic” with “more isolationist.”
Americans are finally giving up the craven doctrine of Manifest Destiny and finding a more balanced role in the gradient between big-stick domineering of other peoples and being a contributing member of a global society. If this is “isolationism,” then bring it on!

You guys are idiots. Sure the average worker in China may earn $ 250 but there is this thing called purchasing power parity (PPP). Perhaps you didn’t learn about it in your economics classes but basically…grocery for a week in china costs about 10 US dollars if even and monthly rent is about 50 USD. So do you still think Americans on food stamps live better?? I’m Chinese and this kind of American intelligence is just so typical.