What are their dollars doing, just sitting in an account gaining interest?
When dollars are in an account gaining interest they are actually VERY active. The bank is using that money to loan it to people buying homes, starting businesses, etc.
That is why you get interest to begin with, its a cut of the profit the bank makes from loans and mortgages.
As someone with a business degree I know how business and markets work, though not with as much mathematical perception as Too Cold. The US is not anywhere near a collapse of any sort. The economy is cyclical meaning it has upswings and downturns.
Despite the media coverage, which has a vested interest in making Republicans look bad, the economy has been doing pretty well the last few years and unemployment continues to be pretty low. Compare our 4.5% unemployment rate (last I checked) with some of the double digits of beloved socialist europe and you will see we are far better off in our alleged "downturns" then they are in their in their upturns! But an economic downturn may be coming, its not a question of if but when. It doesn't mean the USA will become a 3rd world country.
For those of you who say we have no manufacturing, that is true, it is being outsourced because we would rather focus our time and resources on higher yielding ventures. Would you rather have a white collar office job that pays $50,000 a year or a manufacturing assembly line job that pays $25,000?
Maybe an exception is union jobs, but that is exactly why factories with unions are being shut down first, because they drive up the cost of goods and we can't compete in the international markets. And people don't really care about where a good is manufactured. Those who say they only buy US or prefer US made goods definitley don't show it. I know this because I used to work in retail and not once was I asked which product was made in the USA, instead people looked at the price and took the cheaper one (in most cases, unless they already had experience wtih a brand or the more expensive brand had some feature they really needed).
Those here who talk about the loss of manufacturing are voting for the latter, lower paying jobs.
And guess what, if one day we need to manufacture something there is no reason why we cannot open up new factories. Afterall, the engineers and managers who design and run those factories are still here. The knowledge and natural resources are here.
