This shows how the deficit has been made. If you look at the trend, you can see that sending our jobs overseas has made us fall into most of the problems we have now in our country.

On a personal note, I feel that we could have avoided much of this trouble.

If we had kept our jobs and companies here, we would not be where we are today.

What is responsible for the decline in U.S. wages? Trade is certainly one of the most significant causes, because it hurts workers in several ways. First, the steady growth in our trade deficits over the past two decades has eliminated millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. As we showed in another recent EPI report, trade eliminated 2.4 million jobs in the U.S between 1979 and 1994 (Scott, Lee and Schmitt 1997). Growing trade deficits eliminate good jobs and reduce average wages in the economy. Since then, many more jobs have been lost to NAFTA and other sources of our trade problems, including China, and recently, Europe.