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Huh?

What does the USA export, exactly? Even the USA buys most of its "stuff" from China.

Check out your balance of trade, it's never been positive, ever:

https://tradingeconomics.com/u...

That is incorrect.
The USA was a net exporter for much of its existence (outside of US Civil war). The trade balance went only negative in the early 1970's.
http://www.econdataus.com/trad...

Secondly, you're looking at the wrong number.
The number you want is the per capita productivity. The USA is about 5% of the world's population and produces about 24% of the world's economic output by GDP ( but not by purchasing power parity, which balances for poor countries). The USA is a very wealthy country because of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are several reasons why a country has a negative trade balance.
One is that the country is rich so they can buy everything they want. This is the case with the USA.
Also, the dollar is the world's reserve currency. A side effect of this is that it gives the USA a large advantage in international markets, and it also has a side effect of facilitating trade deficits.

Anyway, the upshot is that in the case of CO2 output, the USA historically made a fifth of the worlds industrial goods and thus alone used a fifth of the world's fossil fuels. Reminder: history did not begin in 2006.

I agree with others that industry lobbyists, unhappy with some research that uses H-1B records, may be behind the deletion of records. For example, last June I posted a subset of the Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) online at http://econdataus.com/lcainfo.... . The first large table there shows some of the most questionable data in applications from 2001 to 2013. The green values are values from applications that were certified that appear to be incorrect. As you can see, this data occurred from 2006 through 2008 and included records with company names like "Large Company" and addresses like "address123". But as stated at http://www.foreignlaborcert.do... , "The OFLC will no longer respond to inquiries to confirm priority dates, search for records in response to FOIA requests, or provide information for requests for duplicate certifications for permanent labor certification applications with a final determination issued in 2008 or earlier, in keeping with the OFLC records schedule". Hence, the source record for these years are no longer available, even via FOIA requests. Coincidence?

In any case, it seems that most of the processing of LCAs is automated and that some of the applicants take advantage of this. As you can see from the link above, all requests for over 1000 positions were denied but there were many requests for just under 1000 positions that were certified. That suggests that there is a known cutoff at 1000. Then, there were a number of certified applications that did not appear to contain enough information to determine the workplace location, a critical piece of information for evaluating the requests. Then, I noticed that nearly every application that proposed to pay a salary significantly below the prevailing wage was denied. However, many that proposed to pay a salary many multiples the prevailing wage, suggesting bad salary data, were certified. For example, a request to pay a product consultant $11.4 million a year and a staff dentist $15.5 million a year were certified! That's despite the fact that they listed the prevailing wages as $84,344 and $136,864, respectively. It appears that someone is just applying a set of filters to the data and "rubber-stamping" everything else.

You can see more on this at http://www.reddit.com/r/news/c... .

i saw the forbes link but i was putting it down as partisan or at least vested interest. a couple places show that tax revenues go up every year (w/ some 6 exception years) which casts doubt on the forbes data. this seems to say that http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html. These guys have a really crappy site (so they must be academics) but they say "what evidence there is suggests there to be a correlation between lower taxes and LOWER revenues, not HIGHER revenues as suggested by supply-siders. There may well be valid arguments in favor of tax cuts. But higher tax revenues does not appear to be one of them." They also seem to show supporting data based on percentages rather than straight numbers for gdp which seems to be more valid, imho. http://www.econdataus.com/taxcuts.html

Sorry, just not true.

http://www.econdataus.com/outgdp04.html

Until the invasion, the US didn't owe China nearly as much, nor need China to continue to buy US debt to support ongoing operations (including the ongoing Iraq War).

In February 2003, just before the US invaded Iraq, the Treasury owed China $121.8B, 9.9% of the $1236.4B US total. In November 2008, right before the banking collapse caused a competing top source of US debt, the Treasury owed China $713.2 of $2104.1B total, 33.9% of the total. During that time, China's share of the US debt increased by 3.44x, while the total debt increased only 1.7x.

The Iraq War cost more than the extra $867.7B in debt; indeed, at over a $TRILLION the Iraq War cost could have entirely eliminated the US debt to China.

Nicely cherry picked data. I like how you conveniently left out that the top 10% have seen their income rise from $172,000 in 1980 to $339,000 in 2005 - that's a nice doubling of their income. The top 1% did even better - from $517,000 in 1980 to $1,558,000 in 2005. That seems like pretty good economic progress.

And how did the middle class do? From $51,000 to $58,000. Lower Class? $34,000 to $37,000. Lowest Class? $15,700 to $15,900.

So we know why the top 10% are paying all the taxes: they make all the money. And they pay lower tax rates! From 37% for the Top 1% to 31%, the top 5% from 31.8% to 28.9%.

http://www.econdataus.com/efftax05.html