We' re a Third World Nation.

Americans (and Europeans, too, for that matter) are headed for a very unpleasant surprise.  Having ended a career that began before the sharp decline in the US economy. I still see the benefits of having worked at that time.  Westerners going forward shall not be so fortunate. 

The US has gone from being the world's largest and most important manufacturing economy in 1970 to a perpetual debtor nation endlessly buying more from our trading partners than we can sell them.  The decline really began with the Bretton Woods conference at the end of WWII where the western nations decided to attempt to tear down tariff walls separating economic systems, thus allowing wealth and prosperity to flow amongst all nations.  Perhaps the western nations thought this meant they could thus get easier access to the raw materials of poorer nations and free access to their domestic markets to sell them manufactured goods from the west.  To a point, this worked, then it got far more complex. 

Western manufacturers discovered they could move production offshore  to countries where social benefits and labor unions were non-existent.  Free trade, or "globalization", allowed materials and capital to move from high cost markets to low cost areas where production could be completed at costs a mere fraction of western levels.  The resulting cost savings led to soaring profits for "western" manufacturers, and cheaper prices for western workers which tended to keep them from noticing their declining paychecks.

By now, a casual saunter through any modern retailer will demonstrate how completely we have moved the manufacture of the things we use overseas.  Almost no consumer's goods seem to be made here.  We do build airplanes, heavy technology and the weapons of war--all attractive products  to customers overseas, but we do not sell enough of these items to cover the cost of the daily manufactured goods we need.  The nations (China in particular) from whom we buy the stuff of daily life, have little interest in using the dollar claims they earn from selling goods to the US to buy goods from the US.  China uses these dollar holdings to develop oil and resource production facilities around the globe to held insure it has the petroleum it will need as it's economy grows.  Eventually, China and other dollar creditors will conclude they have invested too heavily in US currency assets.  A dollar sell off will result,  and the value of the dollar will fall.  No longer will items from overseas be bargains.  They will, instead, be expensive.

With the fall in the dollar, US real wages will collapse and the true nature of our situation will become clear to everyone.  To compete on the global market, we will need to earn global market wages.  This is why I tell all my economics classes that "we're a third world country, we just don't generally realize it yet".