What country would you lend money to?
amalcon: I'm not unbiased enough to decide if some other country would be a better bet than the U.S.  Still, I suspect the top outside choices would be India and Japan, in that order.  Japan is miles ahead of the rest of the world in robotics, which means that if the price of Chinese labor ever increases, they own manufacturing.  They still have a piece of the pie, even with rock-bottom labor prices, which says something.India is even more interesting because there are a lot of educated people, but still very low living costs.  Early America is the last time there's been a combination like that.