[quote name='SteveDeFacto' timestamp='1328229828' post='4908930']
, and your opinions are always illogical.

Opinions cannot be illogical.
[/quote]

My opinion is that 1+1 = 5.

I think the greatest source of the problem we (in the US) are in is that schools have been terribly slow to get out of the mindset that produced a small number of college-bound grads, and then roughly equal proportions of those bound for the manufacturing and service industries. Back in the day, you were a creator or businessman (the college-bound), a maker (manufacturing), or a doer (Service) -- roughly a 20, 40, 40 split (so I've heard somewhere), which was fine then -- but now most of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, and schools are still playing catch-up, less so but even today. Instead, a lot of lip-service is paid to building tomorrows high-tech and business-leaders, but mostly its BS, and the system tells us that College is the (one and only) answer. So we turned our focus, when we finally did (or at least pretended to), towards believing that everyone needs to go to college and this became a self-fulfilled prophecy. We no longer separate the more gifted and let them excel on their own, we burden them to wait on ignoramuses because, hey, everyone has to ready themselves for college.

It would be a nice (and welcome) if a high-school student at least had the option to graduate and be prepared for some kind of vocation if that was their chosen path -- but instead we play this shell game of pretending that stuffing more and more students into college will somehow create an economy that can absorb all those people. Universities were long ago stuffed to the brim, and our wonderful "free market" has allowed thousands of private institutions to spring up and do little more than fleece those who have no other options (not to mention the American tax payer, through grants/student aid) by selling them a worthless degree.

IIRC, our economy is now dominated by the service industry (in terms of jobs) -- other jobs that we never thought of as being tied to manufacturing have been flowing out of the US in recent years too. Take the example of Dell or Gateway -- They used to design and build much of their own hardware components (cases, power supplies, motherboards, etc), then some bean-counter came along with his MBA and said "Hey, we can build this stuff in Asia, lower costs, and raise profits! It's good for our stock." thinking they'd keep the rest of the business here, but now those hardware and industrial design jobs are going over too, portions of the business operations that support it as well. Better yet, the companies they used to contract to, after building up their business using those US dollars, thought to themselves "Hell, we do the design and manufacturing and then let these bozos mark up our products. Lets sell direct, and cut out the middle-man" -- why not, after all they can deliver the same goods themselves at lower prices and a higher margin for themselves. This is exactly how, IIRC, Asus came about.

Don't take this to mean that I'm some kind of bitter isolationist, I'm far more unhappy with short-sighted American MBAs about this than I am with foreigners seizing an opportunity. Its just very unfortunate (for the USA / the West) that standard MBA thinking and impotent politicians and regulatory bodies have led (encouraged, even) this to happen.

I tend to think that government is making the same mistake the schools did -- pretending that loosing those jobs doesn't matter and that our bright new future is *points* just over there, rather than solving, acknowledging, or perhaps even realizing that there is a problem bearing down on us.