Take those Boeing planes you mentioned. Are they really "manufactured" in America? They're assembled in America, but many of their components come from overseas. Sure each plane sells for umpteen million dollars, which looks impressive, but many of the parts come from Asia and Europe - we've allowed our manufacturing sector to deteriorate to such a point that we couldn't make those components domestically even if we wanted to. And that's a real problem, as it's the manufacture of those components which creates the most jobs and pumps the most money into consumers' pockets and the government's tax coffers (indeed, it generates an entire ecosystem of jobs, an Amazon rainforest of interconnected industries).

I also question how all of these items are valued. For example, China may ship over a container ship full of airplane parts, each valued at some ridiculously low sum. Boeing assembles those parts into a plane that's miraculously worth a zillion dollars more than the value of the individual components. Anyone can see this is a scam, and it's not gonna last for very long - just long enough for the senior executives to cash out and move on.

Manufacturers like Boeing are living on borrowed time. Today the Chinese are manufacturing more and more of the components of complex, expensive machinery. We saw this happen before, in the computer industry. Players like Dell began sourcing their components from China. Then they opened assembly plants in China. Obviously, the Chinese learned the business from Dell, and quickly copied it. Lenovo is an example of where that story ends - with Chinese companies displacing American companies in a market the American companies invented.

Next China's going to start assembling and exporting their own planes, cars and other heavy equipment, just as they started assembling their own computers. They'll rapidly displace companies like Boeing and General Motors in the marketplace once that happens.

This is what happens when you export your competitive advantage for a short term gain, in this case for cheaper components. Sure you boost profits for a decade, but in the end you're out of business.

Boeing jet are "assembled" in the US. A huge percentage of the parts, ie wings, fuselage, window, seats, are made outside the US, depending on where Boeing wants to sell planes.

But the first sign should have been after effusive promises that they'd keep the IBM management staff in place, what did they do? Toss em all from the top down. So even the Lenovo PC company which operates in the the US is really Chinese managed both locally and from afar.

FWIW IBM can't grow a new Fortune 200 every year over year, which is what Wall St. would require to boost the stock price out of the doldrums. So they've decided to rip a page from Harold Geneen or Charlie Bluhdorn and run their company like a portfolio of investments, acquiring and divesting at will.

The second problem is that the story is largely sourced on information provided from the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy, without even bothering to inform readers that the libertarian think tank has a very specific agenda when it comes to trade (i.e., pro-free trade), and so all its talking points should be carefully filtered.

I am very late to understand that one cannot trust establishment media OR those entities which feed them...for anything like unvarnished truth

These feeders are very often the 'think'-tanks...like Cato.

With any news item know first -if you possibly can - the source and what it is, how it believes.

I'm sure everybody here has known this for along time.

Watash, on the other hand, has been so beguiled/stupid that it wasn't

until last year that he finally came to understand CNN [just~e.g.] as altogether unreliable.

Andrew v.a' v. Lou Dobbs helped with that.

Slow...he's really slow, this one is.

1. I will agree with you that using the verb "to beat" has misleading connotations and denotations. Beyond that, I couldn't disagree with you more. The relative "market share" of a country for manufactured goods affects three important manufacturing considerations. First is infrastructure. If country A's "market share" increases, that means that some plants that previously produced this product line are being shut down and not converted to the production of some variant of the original product line in country B (read, you're no longer making semiconductor chips, you're making spatulas for McDonald's). Your ability to make chips is eroded, not merely not in use. This is a bad thing as it makes it more difficult to retain a lead or create a lead in this manufacturing sector as design and manufacturing are closely linked. And your assertion that the United States and the East Asian nations have been moving forward hand in hand is utter hogwash. The East Asian nations have been taking over the manufacture of electronic components for some time now.

Second is jobs. When country A increases it's market share, they have more jobs, country B has less. Hopefully, you realize that I'm talking about trends, not annual fluctuations in market share.

Third is design capacity. As I said, design and manufacturing go hand in hand. East Asia originally had no design capacity and could only manufacture parts in US supplied manufacturing facilities, but surprise, surprise now they do. Granted, it's not the cutting edge design but East Asia hasn't had the educational infrastructure that would produce the physicists and electrical engineers required to do the research and convert that research into designs to compete with those produced in the US.

The thing we should really be paying attention to is: what gives these other countries a competitive advantage over the US? A whole host of factors plays into this: physical and human resources, social structures and policies, governmental regulation, import export law, transportation facilities, etc etc etc. Why do they have a competitive advantage and do we want to try to erase it? The only thing I've ever heard is that they have a wage advantage and that is simply misleading.

And finally, looking at dollar value only for exports is extremely misleading. Your choice of Boeing is apt. There is an extremely short list of companies who, all by themselves, can have a material impact on the US's balance of trade. Boeing is one of them. So Boeing makes 550 aircraft this year (mostly from components made elsewhere) in the US and Nike makes 2 million tennis shoes in Malaysia. Who's likely to have the more thriving economy.