Shocking Facts About The Deindustrialization Of The U.S. That Everyone Should KnowMichael Snyder Most Americans wont even notice, but the latest monthly trade deficit increased to 42.3 billion dollars The U.S. trade deficit climbed to the highest level in five months in February as demand for American exports fell while imports increased slightly. The deficit increased to $42.3 billion, which was 7.7% above the January imbalance of $39.3 billion, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. In essence, we have gotten poorer as a nation. Have you ever wondered how China has gotten so wealthy? Just a few decades ago, they were basically a joke economically. So how in the world did they get so powerful? Well, one of the primary ways that they did it was by selling us far more stuff than we sold to them. If we had refused to do business with communist China, they never would have become what they have become today. It was our decisions that allowed China to become an economic powerhouse. Last year, we sold 122 billion dollars of stuff to China. That sounds like a lot until you learn that China sold 440 billion dollarsof stuff to us. We fill up our shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic trinkets that are made in China, and they pile up gigantic mountains of our money which we beg them to lend back to us so that we can pay our bills. Who is winning that game and who is losing that game? Below, I have posted our yearly trade deficits with China since 1990. Lets see if you can spot the trend 1990: 10 billion dollars 1991: 12 billion dollars 1992: 18 billion dollars 1993: 22 billion dollars 1994: 29 billion dollars 1995: 33 billion dollars 1996: 39 billion dollars 1997: 49 billion dollars 1998: 56 billion dollars 1999: 68 billion dollars 2000: 83 billion dollars 2001: 83 billion dollars 2002: 103 billion dollars 2003: 124 billion dollars 2004: 162 billion dollars 2005: 202 billion dollars 2006: 234 billion dollars 2007: 258 billion dollars 2008: 268 billion dollars 2009: 226 billion dollars 2010: 273 billion dollars 2011: 295 billion dollars 2012: 315 billion dollars 2013: 318 billion dollars Yikes! It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year. Considering the high level of unemployment that we now have in this country, can we really afford to be doing that? Overall, the United States has accumulated a total trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975. As a result, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and our economic infrastructure has been absolutely gutted. Just look at what has happened to manufacturing jobs in America. Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. And we have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then Many people find this statistic hard to believe, but the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001. Millions of good paying jobs have been lost. As a result, the middle class is shriveling up, and at this point 9 out of the top 10 occupations in America pay less than $35,000 a year. For a long time, U.S. consumers attempted to keep up their middle class lifestyles by going into constantly increasing amounts of debt, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that middle class consumers aretapped out. In response, major retailers are closing thousands of stores in poor and middle class neighborhoods all over the country. You can see some amazing photos of Americas abandoned shopping malls right here. If we could start reducing the size of our trade deficit, that would go a long way toward getting the United States back on the right economic path. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been negotiating a treaty in secret which is going to send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the NAFTA of the Pacific, and it is going to result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 millionmore U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue. So what will this country look like when we lose tens of millions more jobs than we already have? U.S. workers are being merged into a giant global labor pool where they must compete directly for jobs with people making less than a dollar an hour with no benefits. Obama tells us that globalization is good for us and that Americans need to be ready to adjust to a level playing field. The quality of our jobs has already been declining for decades, and if we continue down this path the quality of our jobs is going to get a whole lot worse and our economic infrastructure will continue to be absolutely gutted. At one time, the city of Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city on the entire planet and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. But today, it is a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the world laughs at. In the end, the rest of the nation is going to suffer the same fate as Detroit unless Americans are willing to stand up and fight for their economy while they still can. This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 