Well --- at some point we're going to have to outsource taxes. Without manufacturing jobs, we will produce nothing to export --- Americans will have to import just about everything they buy. All the health care and education and social work jobs (service industry) are tax money users unlike manufacturing which are tax money producers. Who will pay the taxes that supports health care, education, welfare industry, and the military?
The Administration apparently isn't concerned about that.
As long as the transnational corporations can operate in a tax-free global environment, the rest of us, including our government institutions, can eat dirt.
FITZ! Do you read history? Is that not what happened to the Athenian Delian league? When Athen's allies were forced to pay tribute? Or to the Roman republic where slave labor made Romans unemployable creating the imperial welfare state that needed tribute to live?
We have shown that as a people we can not spend less on ourselves nor do we have the ability to raise revenue to the level of spending our politicans insist we need (and we confirm by their election).
In our lifetime we may be seeing the world pay America a "protection tax" collected by our Marines, whether they like it or not.
Damn. Now the push for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax makes sense. They know we won't be earning anything worth taxing, so they'll take it out of the other end.
we're going to have to simplify our lifestyles and learn to get along with the reduced infrastructure that goes with such an existence. I envision trailer-park towns surrounding old city cores and squatter colonies in the ruins of foreclosed suburbs. These people would scrape along by doing non-outsourceable service work when they can get it: upgrading disk drives, removing spyware, editing offshore-produced documentation to improve the English, cleaning gutters for CEOs. It would be feudalism with cellphones.